How do you keep experience hours organized?

[FeenyFee]

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Hi everyone,

I am starting an excel file for animal, vet, research hours (I am terrible at Excel) but I don't feel like its "orderly" enough. Does anyone have a template they can share or any tips to make life easier come application time?

Do you post everyDAY and the hours? Or just weekly?

Also, do you post in hours only, or do you include minutes if they are super close to the hour? Like 2 hrs and 55 minutes is 3 hrs or do you not round up?

 

[pp9]

Hi everyone,

I am starting an excel file for animal, vet, research hours (I am terrible at Excel) but I don't feel like its "orderly" enough. Does anyone have a template they can share or any tips to make life easier come application time?

Do you post everyDAY and the hours? Or just weekly?

Also, do you post in hours only, or do you include minutes if they are super close to the hour? Like 2 hrs and 55 minutes is 3 hrs or do you not round up?

I also did an excel file. Since I did a lot of volunteering and I worked in a clinic without computers (so I didn't 'clock in'), I would record down to the minute how long I worked that day, without rounding. I actually had a formula worked into the excel spreadsheet so every time I input hours for a day, another box would have the updated total. Made it easier when it came to VMCAS. My sheet looked like this:

Date Time in Time out Time elapased Total hours

In order for the formula to work, you have to record your hours as military time. The formula is ' =SUM(D2😀101) ,' with D2 being my first day and D101 being my last day. I then did this for each place I worked, making a new sheet in the same document for each job. I don't think rounding up 5 minutes is that big of a deal...but then again, neither is not rounding up for those extra 5 minutes. If you add up those minutes over time though, you're really only getting yourself an extra hour or two. Nothing that would make a difference.

 

[LetItSnow]

Well. It depends on your goal.

If your goal is purely to have the information to fill out VMCAS .... then track only what's necessary to do that: Activity, contact info, date started, date ended, total hours, and general responsibilities/tasks/whatever. And just update your total hours every time you spend time at that particular place.

If your goal is to have some sort of journal of what you've done, seen, etc, then create a sheet for each separate activity, and track every day's entry by date and use the SUM() function to get the total hours when you need them. (Personally, that sounds like an excessive amount of work to me, but I know some people like to keep detailed journals like that.)

Personally, I wouldn't overthink it. I'd round to the nearest hour and call it good, knowing that if you're putting 2 hours for something that went 2.4 hours and 3 hours for something that went 2.6 hours it all comes out in the wash. If you really want to track it down to the minute I suppose you could .... but what's the point?

 

[Innerspeaker]

For work/vet hours, I only had to look in our computer systems to figure it out and then rounded down to the nearest whole number.

For class/experience hours, I just estimated how many hours a week I participated in the experience activity (using my school's academic calendar for reference), subtracted holiday weeks, and made a rough estimate.

 

[MouseWrangler]

I went the old school route and had a notebook I kept everything in. I rounded to the nearest quarter hour. I wrote the time I started/finished, total time, what clinic/organization I was at, which vets I spent time with, and a very brief description of what I saw (ex: vaccinated horses, floated teeth, etc.). That way when it came time for interviews, I read back through my notebook to remember certain cases that were especially interesting to me.

 

[CynicKitten]

Well, VMCAS calculates it for you - you cannot put in a "total hours" of your own, just the average hours/week + the number of weeks. So keep that in mind! But I did use a spreadsheet. It was not elegant. I also rounded.

But, I wonder how important being precise is. Do they (VMCAS, schools) typically verify the numbers with the organization?

I went the old school route and had a notebook I kept everything in. I rounded to the nearest quarter hour. I wrote the time I started/finished, total time, what clinic/organization I was at, which vets I spent time with, and a very brief description of what I saw (ex: vaccinated horses, floated teeth, etc.). That way when it came time for interviews, I read back through my notebook to remember certain cases that were especially interesting to me.

I think this is very smart, especially when it comes time to write your key responsibilities.

 

[LyraGardenia]

Well, VMCAS calculates it for you - you cannot put in a "total hours" of your own, just the average hours/week + the number of weeks. So keep that in mind!

Ugh, that's new and slightly annoying.

But, I wonder how important being precise is. Do they (VMCAS, schools) typically verify the numbers with the organization?

There's at least one school that verifies all your experiences (UGA maybe?), but for the most part it's my understanding that schools will only contact your experiences if something looks fishy. If you're off by a few hours, it's not a big deal.

 

[FeenyFee]

Well, VMCAS calculates it for you - you cannot put in a "total hours" of your own, just the average hours/week + the number of weeks. So keep that in mind! But I did use a spreadsheet. It was not elegant. I also rounded.

But, I wonder how important being precise is. Do they (VMCAS, schools) typically verify the numbers with the organization?



I think this is very smart, especially when it comes time to write your key responsibilities.

What if you had sporadic hours? Like I volunteer at my lab sometimes 8 hours a week, or 3, or 15, etc. based on when they need me and my schedule

 

[Felixor90]

Excel file. For me it was more important to keep track of awesome experiences than tracking hours. Thanks to this, I had so much exciting stuff to put in the comments part of the experiences section.

Date | Type of Experience | Veterinarian | Hours | Comments

Ex:
7/14/15 | Veterinary: Working as tech | Dr. Rodriguez | 8.5 hrs | Observed gill biopsy and handled baby bald eagle.
7/15/15 | Animal: Volunteering at Dumond | Dr. Bree | 4 hrs | Observed introduction of new mates.

 

[Felixor90]

What if you had sporadic hours? Like I volunteer at my lab sometimes 8 hours a week, or 3, or 15, etc. based on when they need me and my schedule

They get that question a lot and the answer is to average it out (total hours/total weeks), which is why they made the system do it for you automatically.

 

[FeenyFee]

They get that question a lot and the answer is to average it out (total hours/total weeks), which is why they made the system do it for you automatically.

So technically its okay to say 10 hours a week for 5 weeks to get the actual hours of 50 even though I didn't actually do 10 hours a week? If that makes sense lol

 

[Felixor90]

So technically its okay to say 10 hours a week for 5 weeks to get the actual hours of 50 even though I didn't actually do 10 hours a week? If that makes sense lol

That's what they told me to do last year...