Do you think AdComs would admit someone with less than a year of clinical ECs? Assume low-tier MD and DO schools. Does the length of time matter more than the amount of hours?
Length of Time of ECs
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Were you a pre-med since you were a freshman in college, are you a non-traditional student, or did you pick up the pre-med track later on? With the latter two you might get a pass.with the former, you might be in a pickle.
ADCOMs like longevity though I think people go a bit overboard on SDN in terms of their commitments. I still hear that people can get in with 100 to 150 hours of hospital volunteering if their stats are good. The last thing you want to do is suddenly treat volunteering like a fulltime job so that you can crank a couple hundred hours over a couple months. Medical schools will see that you're fake.
My suggestion is to keep doing activities after submitting AMCAS and then telling them at interviews that you're currently doing them. You can drop them once you have an acceptance. Don't take a year off just to boost your hours if you have GOOD stats. It's ridiculous that the dog and pony show that pre-meds put on has to go that far and to waste such significant time.
Just keep volunteering and make sure you have some shadowing under your belt. Good luck!
Were you a pre-med since you were a freshman in college, are you a non-traditional student, or did you pick up the pre-med track later on? With the latter two you might get a pass.with the former, you might be in a pickle.
ADCOMs like longevity though I think people go a bit overboard on SDN in terms of their commitments. I still hear that people can get in with 100 to 150 hours of hospital volunteering if their stats are good. The last thing you want to do is suddenly treat volunteering like a fulltime job so that you can crank a couple hundred hours over a couple months. Medical schools will see that you're fake.
My suggestion is to keep doing activities after submitting AMCAS and then telling them at interviews that you're currently doing them. You can drop them once you have an acceptance. Don't take a year off just to boost your hours if you have GOOD stats. It's ridiculous that the dog and pony show that pre-meds put on has to go that far and to waste such significant time.
Just keep volunteering and make sure you have some shadowing under your belt. Good luck!
Thanks for the surprisingly helpful and insightful reply! haha 😀 I was a late comer. I share your thoughts as well, so I'll just apply and see what happens this year. Thanks!
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I always think it's kind of a grey area when you try to categorize things by length of time or number of hours. Since the most important thing is really the quality of learning and experience you get out of it, what shows more is someone who can talk about how meaningful their experience was (or wasn't), and what they did after that commitment to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to a future in medicine.
Someone can have 700 hours volunteering in the ER, but all they did was file paperwork and never talk to patients or physicians. Obviously, that wouldn't look as good as someone who did a shorter program where they learned to take vitals, talked to many patients, physicians, and learned more about themselves. 😛
Someone can have 700 hours volunteering in the ER, but all they did was file paperwork and never talk to patients or physicians. Obviously, that wouldn't look as good as someone who did a shorter program where they learned to take vitals, talked to many patients, physicians, and learned more about themselves. 😛
so much truth in that 👍Were you a pre-med since you were a freshman in college, are you a non-traditional student, or did you pick up the pre-med track later on? With the latter two you might get a pass.with the former, you might be in a pickle.
ADCOMs like longevity though I think people go a bit overboard on SDN in terms of their commitments. I still hear that people can get in with 100 to 150 hours of hospital volunteering if their stats are good. The last thing you want to do is suddenly treat volunteering like a fulltime job so that you can crank a couple hundred hours over a couple months. Medical schools will see that you're fake.
My suggestion is to keep doing activities after submitting AMCAS and then telling them at interviews that you're currently doing them. You can drop them once you have an acceptance. Don't take a year off just to boost your hours if you have GOOD stats. It's ridiculous that the dog and pony show that pre-meds put on has to go that far and to waste such significant time.
Just keep volunteering and make sure you have some shadowing under your belt. Good luck!
You're right, but adcoms don't care about that and really just want to see hours.
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I would assume adcoms take into consideration more than just hours
They do, but they also look at overall hours.
If you had 20 hours of the most amazing, incredible, life-altering volunteering vs somebody with 250 hours of standard (but clinical) volunteering, you'd still be at a disadvantage.
It's still a numbers game.
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Yeah but they can only take into consideration what the applicant feeds them via essays and the interview. Therefore, any imaginative pre-med can embellish even the crappiest of experiences (which tend to be the norm) into something "meaningful."
Remember, hospital volunteering is like Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Same with hospital volunteering. What happened there is only limited by your imagination. Therefore, everyone will embellish. I doubt any pre-med will be truthful and tell ADCOMsthat they did scut work, did homework, or skipped out on volunteering all together. Plus when was the last time you heard pre-meds telling ADCOMs that they hated their ECs?
Since genuine altruism is such a rare trait, I'm assuming that there are at least a few pre-meds that weren't honest about enjoying their ECs.
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Nothing really works when you take it to such extremes!
I would imagine that the person with 700 hours, when asked during an interview to elaborate on their experiences, it would quickly show that they have a lot less to say than maybe that person who only had a "meager" 100-120 hours in comparison, but was heavily involved throughout their experience, This is ignoring how much each person is able to hype up or make themselves seem like they're the next best thing since bottled water.
There's so many steps in the application process and variables to take into consideration, so the more you can stand out with your skills, experience, the better, right? 😀
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Bingo. The non-clinical volunteering I did was loads of fun. I loved every minute of it. Unfortunately it was so sporadic that only having that without my consistent ED volunteering would have made me look like a selfish bastard.
Therefore I had to get screwed out of thousands of potential dollars by providing free labor to a hospital doing the work of the orderly. It's a small price to pay though for not having to spend way more hours doing clinical work and for getting into medical school in the first place. 🙁
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Here's another thing to think about...
Let's say you have a traditional applicant with decent stats (no need to retake MCAT) but only six months of ED volunteering. They had an unsuccessful cycle, and asked their top choice why they were rejected. The top choice told them because they didn't volunteer enough.
Then after an additional year of volunteering, the applicant reapplies and gets admitted to their top choice. But here's the thing. Even though the applicant now has one and a half years worth of volunteer hours, how have their intentions changed? If ADCOMs perceived them as a box checker a year ago, how are they suddenly different now? Even though they have more hours under their belt, aren't they still the same applicant with the same original intentions as before? Are they magically more genuine or more willing to now serve the underserved communities they pretend to care about?
Or did they just waste a year of someone's life? 😕
Let's say you have a traditional applicant with decent stats (no need to retake MCAT) but only six months of ED volunteering. They had an unsuccessful cycle, and asked their top choice why they were rejected. The top choice told them because they didn't volunteer enough.
Then after an additional year of volunteering, the applicant reapplies and gets admitted to their top choice. But here's the thing. Even though the applicant now has one and a half years worth of volunteer hours, how have their intentions changed? If ADCOMs perceived them as a box checker a year ago, how are they suddenly different now? Even though they have more hours under their belt, aren't they still the same applicant with the same original intentions as before? Are they magically more genuine or more willing to now serve the underserved communities they pretend to care about?
Or did they just waste a year of someone's life? 😕
The mere fact that the med school tells the applicant his volunteer hours were deficient is proof that it's all for the sake of checking off a box.
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i would recommend at least 1.5 years of continued clinical involvement. when i apply, i'll have close to 4 years of hospital volunteering experience, totaling 300+ hours.
and i think 300+ hours spread throughout many years will look better than 300+ hours jammed into a single summer.
and i think 300+ hours spread throughout many years will look better than 300+ hours jammed into a single summer.
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I can't argue with you on that
Obviously people get in all the time on fluffing up their ECs, and discouraging it isn't going to stop anyone anyway. I like to pretend that lying only gets you so far, but we all know that's not true either. 😛
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small question - didn't want to make a separate thread for it. Can you put the same contact for two different activities? ex: MD reference for both clinical volunteering and a leadership position in the hospital. thank you!
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I am employed by my research lab (how I first started) for something not research related, but also do/did research in the same lab. I separated the two experiences since the hours are so different but listed my PI for both of them.
If they're really the best people who could elaborate on your role in such things, I can't imagine why you wouldn't be able to list the same person under both..
