how much volunteering/clinical exposure

[huknows00]

Hi guys, first congrats to all of you who have gotten in this year! Time flies and I will be starting my application this summer. Although I have been pretty steadfast on the research part, I am a little uncertain about my volunteering and clinical experience.

Basically, I only have one volunteering experience at the local Ronald McDonald house playing with kids once a week (1 year). My clinical experience includes shadowing a physician where I work on clinics a couple of times in the summer and shadowing a md/phd attending on his two week inpatient duty.

Besides that, I don't have much other extracurriculars that I do consistently besides working as a photographer at the school paper. I don't know how some of you guys pull off spectacular extracurriculars while still having the time to do research and do well in school. Given that I will be applying soon, do you think it is wise for me to start some volutneering/clinical thing this summer and try to pump that side of my apps up, or should I just concentrate on my research?

By the way, anybody(guy) gonna be at the NIH this summer from June to August and need a roomate? PM me, thanks,

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[javert]

Your question has been asked a lot, so you might want to try a forum search to find more feedback. Research experience obviously is the biggest factor in your application and MD/PhD programs are much more lax when it comes to volunteering and shadowing than the MD counterparts. The schools where volunteering/shadowing plays a larger role in the admissions process are the ones where you are evaluated seperately by the MD committee and the MD/PhD committee (Duke is this way, as is WashU, and there are others). However, even at these schools, there are people who are on both the MD and MD/PhD adcoms and thus can fight for you (if the school really wants you) to overcome any qualms the MD committee may have about volunteer experience. But, then again, they can only do so much and thus there are the occasional people who are accepted MD/PhD but rejected/waitlisted MD.

As for clinical exposure, again this varies widely. I spent three years volunteering in hospitals and two summers working full time in the OR, but others just have some shadowing and do just fine. As long as you have enough experience to intelligently answer why you want an MD and, more specifically, why you want an MD/PhD, that's the most important part.

In my opinion, I think you have enough clinical exposure to do well. As for other ECs, I'm not sure because I actually don't know what's typical of MD/PhD applicants; I know that I was virtually never asked about my other activities during interviews, but I don't know how much weight they carry during adcom meetings. Anyway, I just applied this application season, so I'll have to let the more experienced veterans give you a better answer.

 

[tedrik]

I agree with javert that you have enough clinical exposure as it is. You also asked the question of whether or not you should do some more volunteering while you are going through the application process. If this doesn't cut into your research time significantly, then I would go for it. I had less volunteer/shadowing experiences than you when I applied, but I was still doing some clinical volunteering while I was interviewing. This didn't come up all that much because my interviewers mainly wanted to talk about my research, but it did give me something to talk about when I got questions like: "why not just go to graduate school?" or "how do you know that you will enjoy the physician side of being a physician-scientist?"

Like I said, you already have enough experiences to answer these questions, but if you are looking to get into top programs that are going to look closely at your non-research involvements, you may want to pick up some more volunteer hours.

I am in the same situation as javert in that I just went through the application process this year. So again, despite there being tons of past threads on this topic, it may be helpful for some of the veterans to chime in.

Good Luck this year!