Shadowing experience
Started by Cowgirl24711
e-mail, call, ask everyone in the phone book. It can be a giant pain in the arse. do you know anyone that knows physicians. or maybe ask your personal physician to put you into contact with someone you can shadow.
Is it really that hard to find a DO to shadow? I was hoping to easily find someone who understands that some of the schools require DO letters (since they had to have them, too). What does shadowing involve? How many hours of shadowing are typical? Do we have contact with patients while shadowing?
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I just went to http://cf.osteopathic.org/iLearn/login.cfm and found a DO pretty quickly. You just follow a doctor around when you shadow. You usually will have contact with patients, but you don't know anything about medicine so its pretty pointless. Go two or three times and then ask him/her to write a letter.
The shadowing is easy. It is getting someone to respond to you and allow you to shadow. The first time I shadowed I emailed and called 20 physicians and shadowed the only one who responded.
This. I spoke with a lady on the phone through the Mentor program and she called me back 1 hour later with a DO who was willing to let me shadow. I shadowed them and I have my reference letter already, it was a breeze through that program.
Nice. If I remember correctly there are 6 DO's in my area so I had real slim pickings, but I couldn't have gotten luckier with the doctor I'm shadowing. He is a true baller and was in the 1st graduating class at western.
If you want better results, I suggest writing a letter saying why you want to shadow and what you hope to gain from it. Go to as many offices as you can and drop off the letter along with your resume. You can also call ahead of time just to ask if the doctor allows shadowing and if they do speed over to the clinic and give them your info. I was surprised with how many rejections I got from clinics, since obviously these docs went through the same thing when they were premeds. I plan to help premeds as much as possible.
+ 2 for this. The first doctor office I called took me right away and the doctor was awesome. DO's are very good about letting you shadow. They had to do it and ask for recs when they were pre-meds so they understand your situation and I feel like most want to help.
This was my experience as well. Dallas is a very big city with a lot of DOs. I only got one reply to 35 emails/calls. It ended up being an outstanding experience, and a letter that I'm pretty sure got me into medical school. It was not as easy for me as it obviously was for others.
