Medical Unsure about adding foreign shadowing experience to application

[Catalystik]

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During the summer of my freshman year of college I participated in the Atlantis Project. For those who don't know, the Atlantis Project is essentially a company that sends you abroad to shadow physicians primarily based in Europe. I went to Greece and shadowed doctors for somewhere around 100 hours. I did not participate in any hands-on medical work, merely following doctors around and observing.

I am very unsure about whether to include this experience in my application or not. I did it as a naive freshman, not knowing anything about voluntourism. Was this voluntourism? Probably so. We shadowed doctors for quite a bit, but we also had some free time and I paid to get an experience that I otherwise could have substituted with meaningful domestic shadowing. That being said, I did learn quite a bit from the experience as I was shadowing in a severely underfunded public hospital. Seeing the patients, hospital conditions, and the doctors performing their work was a stark contrast from anything I had seen in the U.S. Either way, because of how voluntourism is viewed among many medical schools (rightfully so) I am very hesitant about adding this experience. Without this experience I will have had approx. 50 hours of peds. shadowing and that is it. I will likely be scribing during this summer as well, but that is not confirmed as of right now.

Any advice would be of great use. Thank you all in advance.

That you observed physicians interacting with patients in an international setting doesn't do much to reassure adcomms that you have a good understanding of how medicine is practiced in the USA, though I'm sure it was very interesting. Fortunately for you, 50 hours of dedicated (US) physician shadowing is the average number of hours listed on the AMCAS application. We always like to see that some of those hours were in a primary care specialty (which includes pediatrics). And it's desirable that you were able to observe longitudinal care, as would occur in an office setting, if possible, rather than acute care or inpatient care exclusively.

If you list the international shadowing, you open yourself up to questions about Compare and Contrast the two medical systems, which IMO wastes precious interview time on a nonessential topic. I generally recommend that you list no more hours than you list for the US, no matter how many hours you actually accumulated.

Just curious: Do you speak Greek or did the patients communicate with their docs in English during your project time? If neither of these is true, I'm not sure I'd call it a true shadowing experience. JMO.