how much to volunteer?

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elvingomez

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how many hours do you plan on volunteering by application time? i have 3 years of paid clinical experience. i just started volunteering a month ago, and it's booooorrrring. no patient contact, i just sit there 80% of the time. i have even changed units, but still nothing. i dunno how much more i can do...
 
I don't have that much volunteer experience -- maybe fifty hours or so (I couldn't do it over the summer because of transportation issues), but I have 80-100 hours of shadowing and I'm a Health Aide at Northwestern (which is kind of clinical experience -- your peers are your "patients"). Therefore, even though I don't have tons of volunteer hours, I feel I have enough other clinical experience to make up for it. It looks to me like you're in the same position -- three years of paid clinical experience is a lot, so if you really hate your volunteering job, I think you'll be ok. However, make sure you have other non-medical community service experiences (tutoring, soup kitchen, etc.) to show some sort of altruism to the adcoms. If you have that, I think you should be fine.
 
hey, thanx for the response, i didn't think about non-medical volunteering.
 
Just to give a different perspective....I think it depends on where you volunteer. I have 250 hours of volunteer time, and I enjoyed it. there were still some departments where you didn't work when there weren't any patients, and the only patient contact I had was in transporting patients and getting food for them. But there was always work to be done, and i thought it was a good learning experience. I got familiar with a lot of medical equipment from working in the stock room, and I was allowed to observe a lot. Once I got to help keep a little boy calm while they put in his IV, and another time I was in the room when a patient was resucitated. However, I know there were departments in the hospital that were boring, it's also a matter of opinion. But if you want to volunteer, there is something out there you will enjoy. I got lucky in finding my volunteer work, but you could probably do an internet search or just pick up the phone book. 😉
 
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