weird question about volunteering

[camb370]

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[AttemptingScholar]

1. Breathe
2. These are the ECs you are applying with. Too late to do anything now!
3. Your GPA/MCAT gets you in the door. Apply to schools with a research mission. You have 2000 hours of ECs so it's not like you were lazing around all day, you just focused on a different (but completely normal) part of the app
4. SDN is neurotic. Don't worry about it. If it doesn't pan out, do more clinical volunteering over the year and try again!

 

[camb370]

1. Breathe
2. These are the ECs you are applying with. Too late to do anything now!
3. Your GPA/MCAT gets you in the door. Apply to schools with a research mission. You have 2000 hours of ECs so it's not like you were lazing around all day, you just focused on a different (but completely normal) part of the app
4. SDN is neurotic. Don't worry about it. If it doesn't pan out, do more clinical volunteering over the year and try again!

Eeek okay thank you this makes me feel better, i think I'll just say it solidified my passion for service Bc of how concentrated it was (which it did). And true haha, it's very neurotic and it's a bit contagious! Gotta watch myself

 

[Catalystik]

apparently my clinical experience was lacking. i have ~300 hours of shadowing from a couple of different specialties (i did this much before i learned it'd be overkill/that it's not actually clinical experience), and my clinical volunteering consists of 150 hours of volunteering at a major children's hospital nearby in their creative arts dept. while this is an (apparently) very low amount of hours, they were only ~3 hours per week for over a year and a half, and i have countless stories from the experience about what it meant, what i did, the one-on-one patient interactions, communicating w/physicians and nurses about patients, etc.

the thing is, i would've done more hours if i could, but i could only volunteer when the "resident artists" were there to oversee me and check every once in a while. however, their schedule was super inconsistent, so i wasn't really able to commit to any other long term formal volunteering since i had to prioritize this (also, i had to balance it with class!). is that okay that i only have 150 hours from this activity then, as long as all 150 were super meaningful and impacted me/the individual kids i worked with?

150 hours of of volunteer clinical experience is pretty average among applicants. For shadowing, about 50 hours is average. You'll be fine.