Timeline for a nontrad student

[buckeye4]

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I didn't do too hot during my first year of college and gave up the pursuit of medical school after my first year.

Dropped out to work full time after my sophomore year, and just recently returned to school. When I returned, I decided to give pre-med another shot. My main priority for my first year back was to focus on GPA repair. I am now just under a 3.6 and at the point where I need to work on gaining experience (extracurricular activities).

I am literally starting from scratch. I have a year left of undergrad and will be starting one or two volunteer gigs next semester.

Interested in a finding out when the activities side of my application (mainly volunteering, but will also include shadowing and possibly research) will be strong enough for me to apply with my background. Assuming my GPA and MCAT will be within competitive range, would a year and a half of solid volunteering at one or two organizations be strong enough?

 

[KiddCo]

I believe the consensus is a minimum of around 150 hours clinical experience, 150 hours of non clinical volunteer experience to undeserved populations (think homeless shelter, food kitchen, habitat for humanity), and ~50 hours shadowing with the majority of those hours with primary care.

Experiences should be something that you personally get out of and not just something to check a box. If you have 200 hours shadowing at clinic X but cant talk 60 seconds about how that impacts you or what you got out of it, then its not a useful experience.

 

[esob]

It varies wildly with your metrics. I had zero primary care shadowing hrs. The biggest mistake I see most premeds makes is overcommitting to EC's and then not getting good enough grades or MCAT scores to make their EC's even relevant. EC's are like 5% of your application and MCAT and GPA make up the rest. When you look at the MSAR, at many schools a significant portion of the class doesn't even have shadowing hrs. The first school listed, which is Albany, shows that a full 25% of their matriculants lacked either shadowing, community service, or both. Another 12% didn't have any clinical experience. Numbers, like science, are true whether you believe them or not and I don't think I've seen a school on MSAR that has 100% in all of the checkbox columns. Get the grades, get the MCAT score, and do whatever EC's you can along the way without negatively impacting either of those numbers.

 

[trapperjohn4077]

I think that if everything else in you app is lined up pretty well, a solid year and a half of volunteering (before you submit your application) should be fine. A single high quality experience with a lot of hours spread out over the whole year and a half is preferable to several disjointed experiences. You'll want something you can write an essay about for your application and talk about in an interview. As for research, that's fairly school dependent. Some schools don't care too much about that, others do. Be careful not to stretch yourself thin by doing too many activities though.