I don't know if this is completely stupid, but I wanted to ask for advice on getting clinical experience. I work full-time to pay my bills and tuition on top of going to school full-time and working in a research lab for my honors thesis. The way my schedule has been structured has made it impossible to get a clinical job or commit to hospital volunteering (I can't guarantee a set day and time for six months because my schedule isn't set in stone). I didn't know if there's any other way to get clinical experience that doesn't involve agreeing to a set schedule for months or trying to fit a clinical job into my insane schedule. I'm having to play catch-up on my clinical hours because of my schedule being so awful for the entirety of undergrad, and I want to make sure to still get meaningful experience. If there's no way around this, I suppose I'll have to take a gap year.
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Trouble Finding Clinical Experience With Busy Schedule
- Thread starter Cheeze1
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Find a different hospital or clinic that doesn't require a 6month set schedule. That's really the only thing I can think of. I never had to commit to a set schedule, occasionally I would be asked to for sure be there for a specific time/shift, otherwise as a volunteer it was fluid, as I was just there to supplement full time staff. If your schedule is full, then it's full, can't add more hours to a day, only way to add more time is to add a gap year.
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After you graduate, apply for full-time clinical jobs and you can build your experiences that way in the gap year
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I've seen applicants who volunteered on Sunday mornings in the pediatric hospital/ward. Could that work with your schedule?
What kind of work do you do? Could you substitute a clinical job in place of the job you currently have?
You may need at least two gap years: one to get clinical experience, and then the second year during which you complete applications and interviews.
Are you currently engaged in any community service? This is an unwritten requirement. You should do it know or do it later but you'll need to have done it. Ditto for shadowing although you don't need more than 50 hours. Start soon to get an idea of what you are getting into -- it may be that this is not for you and better to find out before you get in too deep.
What kind of work do you do? Could you substitute a clinical job in place of the job you currently have?
You may need at least two gap years: one to get clinical experience, and then the second year during which you complete applications and interviews.
Are you currently engaged in any community service? This is an unwritten requirement. You should do it know or do it later but you'll need to have done it. Ditto for shadowing although you don't need more than 50 hours. Start soon to get an idea of what you are getting into -- it may be that this is not for you and better to find out before you get in too deep.
I volunteer on Sunday mornings at my church, and I do research and retail alongside lecture assisting (It adds up to around 55 hours a week of paid work+6 hours of unpaid research for my research capstone credit). My class schedule spans from early morning until the afternoon five days a week, so I end up working until very late in the lab. I have a lecture assistant job that fills a one and a half hour block between two of my classes each day and work long retail shifts on the weekends. The only clinical job that pays comparably to what I make with my retail job would be something like a PCA, but without hospital volunteering, they won't hire me (I've tried before). I don't have time available to get a certification either, so it limits me to scribe jobs, which pay barely minimum wage. It also doesn't help that all the hospitals and my university are half hour or longer commute.
It's easy enough to find shadowing, honestly, because I do my research at a hospital. I've already set up some shadowing with a few doctors, actually. Aside from church volunteering, which I have about 450 hours of, I have volunteering from working at a food bank over spring breaks, helping with a fundraiser for a historical museum for three years, and various campus volunteer events with the sustainability and philanthropy committees at my school. I've maintained a 3.96 cGPA and sGPA and my MCAT practice scores are around a 513 at the moment so I've been doing alright for everything else but clinical hours. I'll have enough free time in the summer to commit to volunteering without worrying about conflicts, but that's kinda too late. I was really hoping to not have to take a gap year, but my schedule isn't allowing it.
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Building up enough activities to put together a balanced application after graduation might end up with you earning a little less for a few months, but will be worth it if you are ready to apply and only have to go through the application process once.
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Just as an aside, church volunteering is not going to be highly valued if it is not service to people who are different from yourself (if your church is running a soup kitchen and you are serving there, that's one thing but doing Sunday School with kids who are similar to you in everything but age would not count as strongly). Fundraising doesn't count for much in med admissions.... planning and holding events or reaching out for donations of cash helps others indirectly but isn't as highly valued as opportunities to serve people who are in desperate need and from whom you may get a window into life circumstances different from your own.
And @wysdoc makes a good point of applying only once. Don't pull the trigger until you are sure that your application is the best it can be. Do it right and you'll only have to do it once. The process is long, arduous, expensive and soul-sucking.
And @wysdoc makes a good point of applying only once. Don't pull the trigger until you are sure that your application is the best it can be. Do it right and you'll only have to do it once. The process is long, arduous, expensive and soul-sucking.
Yeah, I know the church volunteering won't have high value so I've been trying to accumulate volunteering where I can that would be considered high value. The fundraising event was a family-focused Halloween event the museum holds each year to provide a cheaper, family-friendly event for local families. It's essentially a fundraiser only in the sense that the tickets go to keeping the museum afloat. I think I worded that wrong. Even so, it's probably not very high value compared to my food bank volunteering or philanthropy committee stuff.
It seems taking a gap year will be required. I was worried about losing my drive/motivation by taking a gap year, but that doesn't really matter if the alternative is getting rejected and having to take one anyway.
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A lot of churches are involved in service orientation activities, and especially in light of current politics, many of these services may be geared to very vulnerable populations (refugees and immigrants, displaced women and children, homeless populations). I do appreciate that family-friendly events can provide some solace, but for most, going to a healthcare facility does not. Philanthropy is leadership (persuading others to give money), not service orientation.
