Volunteering and Gaining Experience

[Shambledlife77]

Hello,
Im currently in the summer after my freshman year of college. Can someone give me advice on how to go about shadowing physicians and gaining experience in the health field? How to get meaningful experiences for a med school application?
Thanks

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[Shambledlife77]

For shadowing:
1) Reach out to your own family physician/pediatrician/etc. and ask them if they would be okay with you shadowing them, or if they have a colleague who might be willing to take you on.
2) Do you have any family friends or relatives who are physicians you could shadow?
3) Does your school have a pre-med office? Reach out to them and see if they have any connections for shadowing (for instance, my school had a list of alumni who were physicians willing to take students who wanted to shadow).

Gaining experience in the health field:
1) It might be too late to sign up for one this summer, but you could consider getting a CNA, EMT, or phlebotomy certification and using it (the certification alone won't help you get into med school). Easy way to participate a little in patient care, maybe make some helpful connections with physicians for future shadowing/LORs, and possibly make a little money as well.
2) If this isn't feasible financially or from a time perspective, look into local hospitals, nursing homes, hospice centers, and free clinics for clinical volunteering opportunities. Hospitals are tougher - you're more likely to be doing stuff like answering phones that's not really direct patient contact. IMO my best patient contact experiences were at a free clinic where they trained me to do HIV testing/safe sex counseling, and another one where I was doing diabetes screening and a little counseling on that as well.

Other meaningful med school application experiences you might think about:
1) Research - Check with professors and/or grad students at your school, particularly for classes you performed well in, and see if they're looking for someone to work in their lab. Doesn't have to be hard science either - what matters is that you understand the process of scientific inquiry, whether that's in chemistry or economics.
2) Non-clinical volunteering - identify something you enjoy doing that could be used to help others (teach art classes to seniors, coach basketball at a school with a high free lunch population, play board games at a homeless shelter...you name it). Find a place to do that thing and keep doing it until you apply and/or graduate.

Thank you. How did you keep track of all these things. Did you write down the specific names of the things you did? Like the places and clinics and volunteer events?

 

[Dandine]

^^^^^^^^

This. It helps in general to keep a running tab of activities considering you may need to send a resume for certain activities (research, work, something you can send to your rec letter writers). Tracking the hours though will save a lot of time come app season.

 

[CyrilFiggis]

I would counter @cj_cregg and say that clinical volunteering can be very meaningful and much more than just answering phones. Now I know this can be a grab bag based on where you are, but I volunteered at two different hospitals, over 3 years, gained over 500 hours and did everything from stocking carts to transporting patients to feeding preemies to providing compressions on a coding patient to witnessing a thoracotomy.

 

[DBC03]

Talk with the volunteer coordinator at the place you choose to volunteer and tell her/him that you want to be working with the patients directly, if possible. I spoke with the coordinator at our hospital and she told me which department to volunteer with (orthopedics) to get the best patient contact experience. The nurses in charge were more than happy to have me do all patient rounding and I learned a LOT from that experience (it was an excellent experience). I wouldn't have known to apply for that position if I hadn't talked with the coordinator.