Seeking advice for extracurriculars

[deleted1124909]

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[Mr.Smile12]

First, what advice have you gotten from your prehealth advisors/office? You say you are concerned about your "experience", so can you describe what experience you have? I would definitely say for metrics purposes 150-200 hours cumulative by the time you apply is the expectation across the schools for clinical and community service (150-200 each), so how far away are you from that? To that end, experiences during breaks helps, but you would be best served with a longitudinal, sustained experience.

EDIT: Okay, if the advice is to get some significant experience like scribing, etc., then you will be fine if you do that in a gap year. Most of us advisors want to make sure you focus on getting as high a GPA and MCAT score possible but don't apply until you get the hours of experience in. That's a perfectly acceptable strategy to pursue.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I genuinely have almost no volunteer or clinical experience yet. Im just not sure where to start and what would be worth spending my time doing. The advisors at my school really just recommend doing EMT/CNA, but im not sure if those things are right for me.

Let's start from the beginning then: you haven't shadowed anyone yet, though you have had some hospital volunteering (you said it didn't have a lot of patient-facing opportunities). I think that's really where to start if you don't have enough time or money to put down for training as an EMT or CNA. Hopefully you've read some of the SDN articles from professionals as well as maybe had informational interviews with other practicing healthcare providers so you know not only that you want to go into medicine but also why as opposed to other healthcare roles which you would have to work with.

Suffice it to say, at this point, you can't spend too much time in school as long as you can do well in your classes and get a very high GPA for your undergraduate coursework. Hospitals and medical schools aren't going to close down any time soon. Your office does list some general resources to look through if you are seeking some opportunities volunteering in community service or in a clinical environment.

What has resonated with me is your question on whether those specific opportunities they suggested (EMT/CNA) were "right for you", but I'm not exactly sure what you mean. If it's a question of just having enough time aside from what you already do during breaks, I can understand that problem. I guess it would be good to clarify what characteristics would you want that were right for you: is it time commitment, cost for training, risk imbalance for coursework/research, etc.?