Some quesstions about volunteering

[vikingvallhalla]

---

Members do not see this ad.

I was an Americorps Volunteer for a year in 98/99, I was paid minimum wage plus a stipend for college, so although my title was ''volunteer'' it wasn't technically volunteering. Would you count that as volunteering experience? And if so, since it was 10 years ago, what other kinds of volunteering programs should I look for?
I've been working at a shelter for refugees for a year now and will for at least another year before I'll have time to volunteer anywhere regularly. Its also a paid position.
I was thinking of seeking a volunteer position with refugees since I already have a lot of experience and enjoy it but should I diversify? Does having diverse vulunteer experience matter?

 

[Law2Doc]

I was an Americorps Volunteer for a year in 98/99, I was paid minimum wage plus a stipend for college, so although my title was ''volunteer'' it wasn't technically volunteering. Would you count that as volunteering experience? And if so, since it was 10 years ago, what other kinds of volunteering programs should I look for?
I've been working at a shelter for refugees for a year now and will for at least another year before I'll have time to volunteer anywhere regularly. Its also a paid position.
I was thinking of seeking a volunteer position with refugees since I already have a lot of experience and enjoy it but should I diversify? Does having diverse vulunteer experience matter?

First, if you got paid, it wasn't volunteering. doesn't matter if they called it that. second, it doesn't relate to health care. There are two kinds of experiences med schools seek. One is clinical exposure, which everyone must have to get into med school, and most people tend to get this by volunteering in a hospital or shadowing physicians. At a smaller subset of med schools, they also want to see you have non-health volunteer experience, meaning civic, religious or community experience. The soup kitchen, big brother, habitat kind of experiences that let schools know you have given back to the community. This refugee job you describe fits the latter type of volunteer experience. But unless you have healthcare experience you ain't gonna get into med school. Schools want to know that you know sort of what you are getting yourself into. So they expect you to work in a hospital or around doctors for a decent amount of time. They want you to see what doctors do, and the interaction with patients. And so clinical experience, usually obtained via hospital volunteering or shadowing, but can be via employment, is more or less a prereq for med school. Hope that helps.

 

[vikingvallhalla]

I know the answer the first question is obviously that it isn't volunteering if you're paid to do it, but what I want to know is where to put that on my app since it has the confusing title of Americorps ''Volunteer''.

Thanks Law2doc, I have quite a bit of shadowing and still do it regularly. My concern is that although I have lots of interesting things as far as community service and shadowing, I haven't actually volunteered my time anywhere except a week for habitat for humanity.