Hospice Companion Volunteer - Good Gauge of Passion for Health Care?

[IcedCoffeeOnly]

Hello everyone,

I just recently graduated with a B.A. in Math from Cal, and I've been working as a technical recruiter for about 2 months. I bought into the SWE hype in Silicon Valley, and didn't give myself even a single semester to explore what I really liked. 4 years of denial later, it turns out I just cannot program for a career due to a complete lack of passion, so I took on a technical recruiting role at a rather big company so I can at least put my tech background to some use.

I've been exploring different fields with "freshman eyes" now, taking Coursera classes on fields I'm curious about and networking.

In addition to all this, I'd like to get some hands-on experience in health care or something similar to gauge what it’s really like. It doesn’t seem like it’s something I can learn or read about without getting involved.

I’ve been looking for volunteer opportunities in health care, and I cannot commit to hospital volunteering due to my work schedule (all volunteer shifts are between 8-5 weekdays). The only thing I think I can make work is hospice companionship volunteering on weekends. Is this activity something I can gauge my passion for health care with? Not necessarily a doctor's role, but healthcare in general? What other activities do you recommend that can be done on weekends that's can tell me if I might want to pursue a career in healthcare? Thank you.

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[IcedCoffeeOnly]

I think a hospice volunteer would definitely tell you whether you like/can deal with being around sick and dying people, which is pretty much a requirement for most careers in medicine at least to get through the training. That's a big component of it. It does, however, take a certain type of person to do well with and enjoy being part of hospice care - not all doctors and nurses are that type of person.

You would not necessarily get experience with the process of diagnosing and treating a patient, doing basic patient care tasks, etc. that you would get as a physician, nurse, or other types of healthcare professions. For that, I'd recommend doing some shadowing of healthcare professionals in different roles - perhaps in the ED or hospital where people would be working weekends anyway.

I would also check out some of your local free clinics - sometimes they will have evening and weekend hours to accommodate the doctors/nurses who volunteer with them and have a full time day job.

Yeah I was definitely not expecting a "diagnosis" experience, but just health caregiving. I'll contact them and a free clinic to set something up, thank you