Job hopping during gap year

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Xiao

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EDIT: title should read "job HOPPING during gap year"

I am currently applying to medical school and will have a gap year. My situation is this:

I just graduated with my B.S. and started at my new job. let's call it job 1, which I overall enjoy (good pay, nice work environment, year end bonus, but long hours and bad location -- across the country from home). this job is related to healthcare

However, I just received another offer (let's call it job 2) and am in the 3rd round interviews for job 3. both job 2 and job 3 are in finance/business.

job 2 and job 3 are both very close to home. ideally, i would like to spend my gap year close to my family. i had taken my current job without giving this too much consideration, which was a mistake in hindsight. overall, i would prefer job 3 (no offer yet) over job 1 (current) over job 2 (offer on table).

right now I am thinking about quitting my current job and taking job 2, while moving through the interview process for job 3. if i get job 3, then great. if not, i can still be close to my family (but sort of down-grading in terms of work)

the obvious downside to doing this is that if i dont get job 3, i'll be stuck at job 2. the upside is that i'll be closer to my family, and working at job 2 will make travelling to interviews at job 3 much easier. again, job 3 is the most ideal job -- probably the best i can ever hope to get with my current credentials.



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bottom line/TL;DR: will it look bad for medical school applications if i hopped from job to job (i.e. quitting within weeks of starting) during my gap year? I do plan to stay at least a year (Aug 2011 - Aug 2012) at my final work place.

P.S. please don't accuse me of being unethical and deceiving my current employer. i did not take my current job with the intention of leaving -- i've only came this personal decision after having accepted my offer. in any case, i owe nothing to my employer and am a very hard working employee. if they found my performance unsatisfactory, i'm sure they will not hesitate to terminate me.

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A few weeks? Forget you ever worked there.

Gaps in your resume are bad, but listing a job you had for only a few weeks is worse.
 
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If I were you, I'd take Job 2 out of consideration altogether. Stay at Job 1 unless you get an offer from Job 3. If you switch to Job 2 and then don't get an offer at Job 3, you might be miserable. It is understandable, though not ideal, to work at one job for only a few weeks and then quit to start another...but it just doesn't seem right to do it twice. Don't list Job 1 on your resume. A gap of a couple months just after graduation is pretty common while recent grads are finding jobs.
 
Personally I would turn in the application to school ASAP. This would only show job 1 on there and not raise any questions at all. Work whatever job is best for you during the year and whichever place you end up working (2 or 3) you can update the schools during the interview season. No questions, you work where you want, and gives you more incentive to finish applications/secondaries pronto.
 
Do what's best for you. Your schools you apply to don't care at all about any job not directly related to patient care. They don't really look into it as much as an interviewer for a new job would. If a med-school sees that you were an analyst at a hospital for 2 wks and then went to another analyst position at a different hospital, they won't ask you why you did this. They will just say "So you are an analyst at Hospital X? That's cool" and move on to more relevant information...
 
If I were you, I'd take Job 2 out of consideration altogether. Stay at Job 1 unless you get an offer from Job 3. If you switch to Job 2 and then don't get an offer at Job 3, you might be miserable. It is understandable, though not ideal, to work at one job for only a few weeks and then quit to start another...but it just doesn't seem right to do it twice. Don't list Job 1 on your resume. A gap of a couple months just after graduation is pretty common while recent grads are finding jobs.


I've had these exact thoughts. However, the advantage of taking job 2 is that I get to be close to family/college friends, and I won't have to fly all the way across the country for more interviews at job 3 (there are 4-5 rounds of interviews total -__-). The reality is that I won't accomplish too much for my career during a gap year, I'm just looking for some industry experience and $$$.

I feel a pretty common medical school interview question will be what you've been doing during the gap year. -- i'd rather not lie if they probed very closely (something like a month by month interrogation).

Feedback is appreciated.
 
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I've had these exact thoughts. However, the advantage of taking job 2 is that I get to be close to family/college friends, and I won't have to fly all the way across the country for more interviews at job 3 (there are 4-5 rounds of interviews total -__-). The reality is that I won't accomplish too much for my career during a gap year, I'm just looking for some industry experience and $$$.

I feel a pretty common medical school interview question will be what you've been doing during the gap year. -- i'd rather not lie if they probed very closely (something like a month by month interrogation).

Feedback is appreciated.

Do what is best for you. You might not even get into medical school your first time.

I would take job 2. Life is too short to be unhappy.
 
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