volunteering gap years

Started by ilovemedi
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ilovemedi

Full Member
10+ Year Member
hello everyone,
I volunteered at a hospital from '07-2009 (end of junior year of high school to start of second year in college), and I've accumulated over 200+ hours, however I stopped and did research/volunteer at a dementia day care center, work [till present day today]. Now i'm starting again at a different hospital this March.

I'm applying this June... but do I have a good amount of volunteer hours even though it was from a couple yrs ago? Again, I only stopped because I couldn't keep up with driving back home after my second year since I wanted to focus on other EC's.
 
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ilovemedi said:
hello everyone,
I volunteered at a hospital from 2007-2009 (end of junior year of high school to start of second year in college), and I've accumulated over 200+ hours, however I stopped and did research until the end of 2011. Now i'm starting again at a different hospital this May.

I'm applying this June... but do I have a good amount of volunteer hours even though it was from a couple yrs ago? Again, I only stopped because I couldn't keep up with driving back home after my second year since I wanted to focus on other EC's.
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You can list them as past activities and hope they can score you brownie points. This can get a little fishy with some members on here, as for way you can represent them. The loopholes in the AMCAS can allow you to misrepresent them, but so many years probably make impossible.

Just restart ASAP! And having the past hours will show that it probably wasn't trying to do as much volunteering as possible close to application.
 
ilovemedi said:
Sorry I'm confused by what you're saying. my hospital volunteering went through the start of my second year in college, and I read on the different threads you most definitely can count it if you CONTINUE through high school. So I will include it as one of my activities.
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Oh I'm sorry. I must have been confused. Yes the general consensus is if you volunteered from high school into college, you can put it down. Just make sure you start again and are volunteering at the time of filling out your AMCAS! I hear it is red flag if you are not volunteering when you fill it out.
 
thanks, I definitely will. it seems that the average hours are ~150. I've done beyond that during college, but my concern is the gap in volunteering at the hospital. I was still doing other things, however (see first post)
 
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ilovemedi said:
thanks, I definitely will. any other input? it seems that the average hours are ~150. I've done beyond that during college, but my concern is the gap in volunteering. :/
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I'm sure the gaps won't hurt you as long as you did some constructive (aka looks good on the application) things in the meantime. 🙄 It looks like you did! You should be fine.

You also said you volunteered at a dementia daycare. If you put all of the volunteering together under one activity, you can list it from start date to present!
 
The gap won't be a big deal as long as you clearly indicate such a gap.

And you have above average in terms of volunteering amount (traditionally 150 hours/ 1.5 years on SDN).
 
List the hospital thing... 200 hrs over 06/07-08/09 comes out to about 4 hr/wk for 26 mos which is close enough....

the Alzheimers day care is a different place and, no doubt, a different set of duties so I'd suggest listing that separately.

It is perfectly reasonable to have volunteered in the past and dropped it to work more intensely on research or some other endeavor.
 
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