Newly premed - extracurriculars ?

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Smitty3L

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I am in my junior year in undergrad and recently switched majors and have decided that I want to go to med school. So now I am feeling very far behind as far as volunteer work/shadowing and all of that. I have been working as a habilitation training specialist with the developmentally disabled for about 6 months now. I love the job but it requires a lot of my time and I'm afraid that I will not be able to gain very much more experience because of it. Should I get a different job which requires less of my time?

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Welcome to SDN!! :) Adcoms like applicants who are passionate about what they do, rather than those who do only what they think will get them into med school. Assuming you've done some sort of EC's in the past that you've been enthusisatic about, I wouldn't worry too much. I would think that your current job is very good experience, and more valuable than a lot of volunteer jobs, although you might want to make a little time to shadow a doc. They like to know that you have some idea of what you're getting yourself into. I think adcoms are understanding about applicants who don't have a million EC's because they're working while going to school. All this assumes, of course, that you've got a decent GPA and MCAT score, done all the pre-reqs, have great LOR's, and write and interview well.

Good luck with your MCAT preparation (which is probably the main thing at this point) and your application. :D
 
My GPA should be decent (3.5/3.6 showing a strong upward trend) and I am currently studying for the April MCAT.

I know that some sort of shadowing is a must so that the adcom knows that my interest isn't purely romantic, etc. Speaking of which how do any you guys go about that?

I'm just worried that I may be only have a very few hours a week to do this. I also have zero time for extracurriculars. I work every day as soon as I get out of classes and about 16 hours on the weekends. I am currently working on getting my hours reduced but the way this business goes I don't think that will ever happen for very long (Very few qualified applicants... giving a 20 year old a bath and taking him to the bathroom is not work for everyone!)
 
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