Volunteering Abroad & Concerns About Mentioning it on App

[greyz]

Hi all,

I'm currently an incoming junior undergraduate planning on applying in 2025, and I have a question about volunteering abroad. Recently, I've started a Global Brigades chapter at my university, and am the president, which entails managing finances, trip plans, etc. I understand that there's been a range of different perspectives regarding international volunteering and especially voluntourism, which is something I've really dug into and have discussed with the advisor for our upcoming Brigade next March.

I was told that the extra funds that we have would go to the clinic at the capital of the developing country we would be volunteering in, and that volunteers partake in clinics that would see around ~100 patients a day (with consultation stations, dental stations, pharmaceutical stations, hygiene education, triage, and vitals). I was also told that the organization continues to send follow-ups to the communities brigade chapters visit, and funding goes towards training local community members to provide essential medical care so that patients would not have to travel 2 hours to the nearest healthcare facility. These are all points I'm planning to emphasize to prospective members who may be concerned about voluntourism.

I understand that these opportunities often benefit volunteers more, considering we're paying / fundraising to go, but as someone who's interested in exploring and engaging in healthcare structures in other countries and maybe pursuing an MD/MPH, I am definitely interested in this kind of opportunity. Planning for this trip and maintaining this leadership role has been a decent amount of work, and I would love to write this as a leadership role on my application and how it has affected and will affect me. However, I'm a bit antsy after going through some posts on SDN/reddit about mentioning this kind of volunteering on my application. Do adcoms really just see international volunteering on an application and simply just regard it as voluntourism and move on? I have other clinical / volunteer experiences under my belt, and I'm not just partaking in this to bolster my application in a last-minute manner, but I would still love to mention it.

Thanks for reading

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[cj_cregg]

Ultimately, I think it depends on how you frame it. I have certainly seen applicants who have a very surface level understanding, if any, of the ethics of global health work, and who seem to have a savior complex and didn't seem to learn much from the experience. I have also seen applicants be able to speak maturely and insightfully about the pros and cons of the work they did, who clearly did their research before and after the trip, and who have an ongoing record of care for the underserved locally and abroad, including doing global health locally (service to immigrants, refugees, migrant farmworkers, etc in their own backyard).

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the big no-no with pre-medical students going on global health trips is not doing anything outside your scope of practice. If you wouldn't be allowed to do it in the US, you should not be doing it elsewhere. There are of course lots of other things that are involved with an ethical global health experience, including a longitudinal relationship with the communities you work in, supporting local workers/economy and involving locals in planning and decision making, some level of cultural and language education before you go, etc. - what you've described sounds like it's on the right track for all that.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

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