How should I keep track of volunteering, research, and clinical hours?

[deleted937918]

I'm wondering what tips you have for keeping track of pre-med hours. I'm looking into building a spreadsheet, but what exactly should I include for each event?

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[FreeRadicals]

This isn't rocket science. Just know your start date and end date and calculate the amount of days and multiple by the hours per day (assuming each are consistent). In the case you do want to make a spread sheet - keep track of 'sick days' and individual hours for each activity.

 

[deleted937918]

This isn't rocket science. Just know your start date and end date and calculate the amount of days and multiple by the hours per day (assuming each are consistent). In the case you do want to make a spread sheet - keep track of 'sick days' and individual hours for each activity.

Obviously, I'm going to include the time, date, and an event title. I've used spreadsheets in the past to keep track of volunteering hours for scholarhships, but med school is a whole different ball game IMO.

My main question is what I should keep track of and how I should categorize them. I'm considering the following categories:

1. Clinical Volunteering
2. Non-Clinical Volunteering
3. Research
4. Shadowing
5. Internship (I'm not sure how to categorize this one. Right now, I'm doing a cancer prevention and control internship. Some of it is research-specific, but some of my hours are only lecture-type presentations (not for academic credit) on ethical research or similar topics. Should I count those too?)

 

[Pizza12]

Soup kitchen I volunteer at has a website which logs our sign ins and outs and summarizes hours by year

 

[On_The_Way_Up]

In your head if you a real pre med

 

[raiderette]

Make sure to keep contact names and information for supervisor. I made sure to contact each organization to clarify this info before putting it on application, especially because they preferred a different contact person than the one I had listed.

 

[deleted937918]

Stop worrying about categories and simply track each experience now. You do not report some total category number on your AMCAS; you report each one individually

Should I keep track of each day or just lump it all together per institution? For example, if I volunteer weekly at the local hospital, should I have 52 individual entries or just one with a starting and ending date?

 

[LizzyM]

I'm wondering what tips you have for keeping track of pre-med hours. I'm looking into building a spreadsheet, but what exactly should I include for each event?

You need an entry for each activity that names the institution, the address (at least city, state and zip), name of supervisor or contact, the contact's email address and phone number. You can keep this in the contacts in your phone or anywhere else that is convenient. You may need to update supervisor or contact if people move on or otherwise change.

If I were going to start to keep track of hours for a number of activities, I'd use a spreadsheet with the dates in column 1 (Create a list of sequential dates) and then label the top of each subsequent column with a code corresponding to an activity (e.g. HospV for Hospital volunteer, SK for Soup Kitchen or whatever code works for you) and enter the number of hours done each day. At the bottom, tally the number of hours. It should be easy to see start and end dates. You could make a tab on the spread sheet for each year or each quarter of the year or however you wish to break it down.

You don't need to be this anal. You could write information on a plain wall calendar and save the calendars and tally things up when it comes time to do your AMCAS. That is a little more work in the end (the adding up) rather than having that done automatically in a spreadsheet. You have to decide what works best for you and stick with it.