MORE Volunteering = LESS Desirable Applicant?

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Sorry to double post, But H No, for 2 reasons HS is easy and varies between schools so much, and some people dont take school seriously until college.

Maybe those 14-year-olds should start focusing on their career prospects if they want to succeed. 🙄


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[KnuxNole]

They should be worried about their newlyfound hormones at that age 😉

 

[Drrrrrr. Celty]

Maybe those 14-year-olds should start focusing on their career prospects if they want to succeed. 🙄


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Honestly thinking about anything from high school coming back to bite me in the ass gives me chills. The crap is locked away forever.

 

[Spinach Dip]

Well when med schools stop rejecting applicants with 3.8 Gpa's and 32 mcats because they have less volunteer hours Pre Meds will stop trying to outdo each other in that department.

👍 A very concise and efficient summary!

I was talking to another premed a few months ago. We were trading stats and tips. At some point he asked, "so what did you get on the MCAT?" I said, "I hope to get up to 35 by test day." His very next question was, "So where are you volunteering?" He then spent the next several minutes talking about all the volunteering positions he'd had and hoped to get soon...

I could not believe which subject he was more interested in... but I managed to act like he'd said nothing.

The idea remained with me, though--and I see it reinforced on this website every day. It's the idea that Volunteering > Stats. Or, to put it another way, that you can have a 3.8 and 35 (which is the 95th percentile BTW), but that is all meaningless if you haven't volunteered at soup kitchens or the old folks' home or the local ED for a couple years.

 

[Anathema]

👍 A very concise and efficient summary!

I was talking to another premed a few months ago. We were trading stats and tips. At some point he asked, "so what did you get on the MCAT?" I said, "I hope to get up to 35 by test day." His very next question was, "So where are you volunteering?" He then spent the next several minutes talking about all the volunteering positions he'd had and hoped to get soon...

I could not believe which subject he was more interested in... but I managed to act like he'd said nothing.

The idea remained with me, though--and I see it reinforced on this website every day. It's the idea that Volunteering > Stats. Or, to put it another way, that you can have a 3.8 and 35 (which is the 95th percentile BTW), but that is all meaningless if you haven't volunteered at soup kitchens or the old folks' home or the local ED for a couple years.

Isn't that the truth. I've seen too many posts of people getting rejected or waitlisted and asking the adcomms what went wrong and receive the response "not enough volunteering." That phrase never made much sense to me b/c it's as if they're just calling for the tryhards to come out and apply.

 

[QofQuimica]

Totally agree with you here.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because You don't feel like you're learning anything valuable, or that you didn't already know, doesn't mean everyone else isn't benefitting either.

Case(s) in point. I was reading a med student blog and in several posts the blogger commented on how those "communicating" with patients seemed like a total waste of time because it was pretty common sense stuff. Flash forward a few months and that blogger was the patient and the resident examining her had terrible communication skills. All of a sudden she decided that maybe those classes weren't such a waste after all as some people obviously did need to develop those skills. I work in a teaching hospital, this is very, very true and the degree to which the residents differ in their ability to talk to patients and work with other staff members has been really surprising.

In my case, I volunteer at a student run free clinic and some students are awesome interviewing patients and others are absolutely painful to watch in their interactions with patients, but getting better with practice.

So maybe you have it down, others are still learning. There are tangible benefits from volunteering, especially if you're actively trying to learn all you can and maximize the experience.

That said, there is definitely too much phony, gaming the system nonsense going on.

Even if volunteering wasn't a requirement, some people would still do it, and those people would probably have an edge with admissions, so by default other people would do it anyway to be competitive.

Agree with all of this completely.

During my last year of med school, I overheard a group of first year students talking about their communication class. One girl was saying that she thought it was a total waste and taking time away from studying "real" medicine (i.e., science). I said to her, "The reason you need this communication class is because you think you don't need it."

I also sat on the adcom for four years while I was in med school. I had (and continue to have) zero sympathy for people who claimed they had "no time" to volunteer. If I have time to volunteer as a resident, then so do all of you. Like anything else, if it's important to you, then you make the time. I mean, you all have enough time to waste reading SDN and posting on this thread, right?

As a senior resident, I'd argue that altruism is more important to me than ever in my current level of training, not less. Medicine is a team sport. No one likes the guy or gal who always puts their own interest first and isn't willing to sometimes take one for the team in terms of things like staying late to help get the work done, speaking to that bat-s*** crazy family, showing the interns or med students how to do something, etc.

When you all get to your third year rotations, you will quickly come to understand how much an unconcerned resident can detract from your learning experience. Because don't get me wrong; it's *much* easier to blow off students in particular. They're slow, they make more work for me, and some of them are just plain annoying. But again, teaching junior trainees is something you do because others helped you when you were in their position, and because you (hopefully) want them to have a better learning experience than you sometimes had.

As a premed, you aren't capable of teaching anyone much about medicine yet. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a patient is get them a blanket. So get them the effing blanket with the understanding that at this point in your career, you're contributing how you can. And again, we all should be pitching in to help. If I'm not too good to get someone a blanket even though I'm already a physician, neither are any of you.

 

[Barcu]

You may be right. Or... You may be wrong. If you look back at threads regarding the topic of volunteering spanning back a few years, you will see varying opinions from respected and well-informed posters. Some people say that volunteering demonstrates altruism and other important character traits that ADCOMs look for, and other people, like yourself, say that it's about gaining experiences that will help you in medical school. This implies that schools are NOT looking for saints.

There is evidence coming from a wide variety of posters that supports both sides of the argument. I'll just mention a few things I've read in past threads that go against your argument.

The first is anecdotal evidence that starting volunteer activities just months (or at least less than a year) before applying to medical school will look bad and actually harm the applicant. This is because according to the posters, the applicant will be perceived as a box-checker. Therefore, if volunteering is not about showing altruism and is only there to help you during admissions, then why would an applicant be criticized for being a box-checker? I mean, the applicant is getting a sense of the hospital environment and is doing "good" during these few months, so why should this hurt the applicant?

The second evidence is where re-applicants who contacted the ADCOMs at schools they were rejected from were told that they did not do "enough" volunteering. I think people can safely say that after maybe a maximum of fifty hours (well below the anecdotal "average" of 100-150 hours), an applicant will get to know the clinical environment, probably have a good tale or two for the PS and interviews, and will start suffering from diminishing marginal returns going forward. So why would ADCOMs be pushing for more hours, if they aren't necessarily looking for "altruism." If an applicant demonstrates knowledge of the clinical environment and has "helped" along the way, isn't that enough? Only "altruism" would be demonstrated by a much longer commitment, as everything else would already have been done.

What volunteering means in the eyes of ADCOMs will remain a mystery. Maybe it has different meanings among different ADCOM members. Who knows? Not I, nor you.

In some respects, quantity does matter because adcoms can be suspicious of activities started right before the admissions process. But in general, the actual amount of volunteering doesn't matter as much as doing something you actually like or are passionate about.

Your volunteering experiences aren't just for admissions. They certainly teach you a lot more than most applicants give them credit for (I'm telling you, people tend to underestimate the benefit of interacting with other healthcare workers or patients).

More importantly, they reveal your interests (or they should). And that's the point I'm trying to make. If you actually get something out of your volunteer experiences, it will come across in interviews. This actually shows that you are passionate and even altruistic. See, it's not the actual experience itself but WHY you chose to volunteer there and WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GOT OUT OF IT. That's how you show that "altruism" that adcoms are looking for. It's not the hours themselves. Adcoms can tell when people are faking or just doing things for the application.

Bottom line, volunteer experiences can help you stand out from other applicants. Choose them wisely, and try to find something that conveys what you want to convey to adcoms.