closed.

[ekgrrr]

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closed. THANK YOU 🙏 🙏

 

[Faha]

Some schools screen at 150 hours of non clinical volunteering. Georgetown, Loyola and Rush are looking for applicants with many hundreds or thousands of hours of non clinical volunteering. Some of your schools are unrealistic with a MCAT of 510.
I suggest these MD schools with your stats:
MCG
Mercer
UGA (when it opens)
Methodist (when it opens)
Wake Forest
NOVA MD
Belmont
Alice Walton
Roseman
TCU
Medical College Wisconsin
Oakland Beaumont
Virginia Commonwealth
Eastern Virginia
George Washington
Penn State
Drexel
Temple
Jefferson
Albany
Vermont
Quinnipiac
For DO schools I suggest these:
PCOM (all schools)
VCOM (all schools)
ACOM
WVSOM
KCU-COM
ATSU-KCOM
DMU-COM
AZCOM
MU-COM
NYITCOM
Touro-NY

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Where are the 2700 hours? You only list 1000 hours as a camp counselor and 1700 hours through a campus org and then a free clinic.

Would you please re-write your activities and properly itemize your activities and responsibilities? You do not have service orientation activities listed in this inventory, and having zero hours puts your application at risk of getting screened out at schools where you do not have a strong mission fit. The details are very important to discern your purpose as a physician from which one can determine your mission fit.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Thank you so much for taking the time to look through this. I really appreciate your feedback and understand where you’re coming from. I realize now that I probably should have broken things down more clearly in my original post, but I held back out of fear of being recognized.

For clarification, I have around 950 hours with Camp Kesem as both a counselor and executive board member. I helped lead year-round programming and was in charge of raising $190,000 so the two week-long sessions for camp could remain completely free for the families we served.This was completely voluntary so I counted it as non clinical volunteering. I also have about 1,600 hours with Doctors Without Borders at my school over the past four years. That number comes from receiving the Gold Presidential Volunteer Service Award for three years and logging around 100 hours during my final year.

Our chapter focused heavily on community engagement from our students, which included organizing hygiene kit drives for unhoused individuals in our area, fundraising for crisis medical relief, and hosting campus-wide donation and education events. We also did a lot of clinical volunteering such as hospice + hospital volunteering through the org via partnerships. I completely understand that not all of this fits into traditional volunteering categories, but service has been a constant part of my college experience and something I’ve stayed committed to. I’ve always viewed these as deeply service-oriented but pls correct me if I’m wrong. Thank you so so much again for your honesty. It helps tremendously.

As I advise, you must classify activities according to the AMCAS categories; however, admissions committees place greater weight on service-oriented activities that I consistently mention. Fundraising addresses leadership competency, as does serving as an executive board member. That's why I was wondering how you could get 1000 hours as a camp counselor. There may be an hours adjustment when we analyze your activities because being a full-time counselor is 24 hours per day compared to most volunteering gigs that are 3-4 hours per day (unless you were a shelter volunteer doing residential service). Again, MSF fundraising and your accolades are leadership accomplishments for admissions... unless you did logistical support in the war zones. I'm fine with the hygiene kit assembly as counting towards service orientation, but many other adcom faculty want more direct face-to-face interactions.

I get wanting to do your own thing that should be volunteering, but medicine is still conservative in its mindset and thinking. In a large sea of potential great candidates, schools can set the rules to tell you how high and far to jump.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I understand! I’ve been reflecting on it a lot, and I was honestly always under the impression that the work I was doing counted as service. I see that some of the ways I labeled or described them might not fully capture that, at least in the way adcoms traditionally define it. Do you think this is something I could clarify and expand on in secondaries, especially in the service or mission-fit prompts? Or would you recommend steering away from more service-oriented schools entirely? I don’t want to misrepresent anything.

There's the definition of service orientation (which you clearly have intrinsic motivation for service), there are examples of service, and then there are activities that help you with admissions selection. We have pointed out that your hours are low for many programs that want to fill their class with dedicated service leaders who are committed to their communities as health professionals. I'm not sure if you are a "service leader" but we don't have your real AMCAS.

My question is (now that you redacted your profile), did you describe your community service activities accurately for us (without the 2700+ hours) or did you include it in your AMCAS and just decided not to tell us? If this was important, I wouldn't have needed to bring up this discrepancy. What worries me are assumptions about "what counts," especially as you cross our paths when it's too late to adjust your primary application and secondary strategy. (I don't know where you are applying to advise you about how to approach "more service orientation" if your secondaries don't ask about them or limit your words to describe them.)

I know about Camp Kesem and I know roughly how many hours most applicants likely put down after a summer or two. Depending on how you describe the length of your involvement with them, 2000+ hours signals a real time commitment that grabs my curiosity to think "did you make a 'zero' mistake of adding an inappropriate zero, or how long were your counseling commitments?" How do your activities connect with your purpose to be a physician? That's missing to me.