working at a family-owned store

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[ChubbyChaser]

hello
Our family owns a store, and i have been working couple of hours each week for many years, and like 3-4 days/wk during winter and summer breaks for 5+ hours. Can I include this in my application? how will this be considered by the admission committee?? (it is obviously not related to medicine in any way)

Also, how does volunteering during summer look in the application? I was thinking of volunteering for many hours during summer (4-5 different positions) and maybe a couple of hours during school year (2-3 positions) Is this a good idea? Thanks

For the first part yes you can put it in the AMCAS, they probably wont care to much about it but I guess it shows you have time to do other things. As far as volunteering goes I would say you should get heavily involved in probably 2 things and keep doing that for as long as possible, that will look better than 5 different positions.

 

[basketball]

For the first part yes you can put it in the AMCAS, they probably wont care to much about it but I guess it shows you have time to do other things. As far as volunteering goes I would say you should get heavily involved in probably 2 things and keep doing that for as long as possible, that will look better than 5 different positions.

hey i thought it would actually look pretty good on my application because I pretty much worked part time during the school year and almost full time during breaks at my store. It also shows that i did all of my ec's and kept up with my grades as well as helping out my family. any other opinions?

 

[nick_carraway]

I say put it down since I agree with you that it will be viewed positively. I'm a firm believer, now that this cycle is almost over, that adcoms want unique applicants. They want applicants that peak their interest, whose applications raise questions that they want to know the answer to. Do a lot of people work at a small business? Sure. Will this differentiate you, however, from the countless applicants who look exactly the same on paper? It sure will.

The worst case scenario is that amwatts is right and adcoms read it and move past it. I think, however, that every job teaches you something and provides you with a new perspective. You didn't do the job for very long, but I think it's fair to say that you learned a new skill from working.

That new skill, if you can write about it beautifully in your EC description, might convince adcoms that you're an applicant worth interviewing and that gets you one step closer to an acceptance.

 

[nick_carraway]

I just saw the second part of your post. I agree with amwatts that you don't want to do 4-5 positions all summer long and just rotate through them. Sure, you can do that at the beginning (and even then, I'd only check out 2-3 each summer). Try out each internship and see what you like. A lot of experiences seem great at first but get real lame real fast. Other ones take more time to grow on you, but might be ones that you stick with.

 

[basketball]

hey koko thanks for the reply! i will and have been volunteering at 3 different places for many years, and i plan on doing 1-2 more positions only during summer, but is this a bad idea? Im not doing much this summer so why not volunteer? lol.
or should i volunteer for longer hours in the positions that i have been volunteering?

 

[nick_carraway]

hey koko thanks for the reply! i will and have been volunteering at 3 different places for many years, and i plan on doing 1-2 more positions only during summer, but is this a bad idea? Im not doing much this summer so why not volunteer? lol.
or should i volunteer for longer hours in the positions that i have been volunteering?

Either way sounds fine. It's up to you. If you want to see what else is out there, go for it. If you think you aren't contributing enough in what you're already doing, just put in more hours.

 

[kypdurron5]

I like it- but I would book it more as "helping out your family" vs. "working a part-time job." I assume you were compensated, but you probably could have made more money working elsewhere, thus it really is a bit of a service, family-oriented activity that I think looks good. It also explains what you were doing with a not insignificant portion of your time.

 

[basketball]

hey thanks for the reply! so i was wondering how adcoms will be sure that I worked x amount of hours for x amount of years? because it is a family-owned store, im not sure if the admission committe will believe me, and im not even sure they would take a LoR from my parents lol

 

[TheMemoirist]

hey thanks for the reply! so i was wondering how adcoms will be sure that I worked x amount of hours for x amount of years? because it is a family-owned store, im not sure if the admission committe will believe me, and im not even sure they would take a LoR from my parents lol

I worked for my dad's clinic for several years, and I ended up with some crazy amount of hours there. No one ever doubted it. I think that if it's clear that you've been working at a family establishment, and the amount of time you've listed is at least possible, then the adcom's should have no problems.

With that in mind, you shouldn't need to get a letter from your family. Even though I had like, 1000+ hours in his clinic, I never asked my dad to write me a recommendation. In general, it's just not a good idea to get family to write you a letter. In fact, I can't think of any time it would be good to have a family member write your letter. If you wind up doing volunteering, you can get a letter from someone you volunteered under. And then there's always your professors. You'll have so many other options for letters that you should just forget about asking your parents/family.

 

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[LizzyM]

Hey, I worked in my family's store when I was a kid and so did a couple of other adcom members. List it, you can show it as employment but leave the number of hours per week blank. Then in the text, describe the school year and vacation hours and the fact that you've been working there since you were x years old. (I know that I started at least a decade before I could legally work 😉 )

 

[dd128]

Hey man this is good to put on an amcas app, and shows that you were involved in something other than school during college. I would make sure the part is known that you were helping out your family, but it's not going to greatly distinguish you from other applicants IMO. There are people who worked full time, 40+ hours week, their entire undergrad career not just breaks, and you're just setting yourself up to be compared to these people if you go into an interview stressing how much you worked during undergrad.

 

[basketball]

Hey, I worked in my family's store when I was a kid and so did a couple of other adcom members. List it, you can show it as employment but leave the number of hours per week blank. Then in the text, describe the school year and vacation hours and the fact that you've been working there since you were x years old. (I know that I started at least a decade before I could legally work 😉 )

ahah yea ok! so it helped you a lot right?? 🙂 I hope this work exp will make my application stronger! oh and why didnt u include the number of hours in the list? cant u just kinda estimate?

 

[TheMemoirist]

hey memoirist, did that experience make u stand out from other applicants? btw my work experience wasnt medically-related, unlike urs. i will have worked for over 10 years by the time I apply

honestly, i'm not sure if my experience helped me to stand out. i kind of doubt it. i think a lot of my other ec's might have helped in that regard, but most applicants have a lot of healthcare experience as well, so even though i had a ton, i'm not sure if it made much difference. but i didn't work there for 10 years! i only worked, off and on, for about 4 years. i think 10 years of anything, medical or not, shows a kind of commitment that you can't demonstrate from volunteering for a semester of having a summer job here and there! if you can use your personal statement to somehow show how your history of working in the family store makes you a better applicant, you'll likely have a very unique and interesting application.

 

[basketball]

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[TheMemoirist]

thanks memoirist! i really appreciate ur responses!
I have been volunteering at this place for a really long time, and I will have volunteered for 8-9 years by the time i apply... (this is also not really related to medicine) but not long hours though - a couple of hours/wk. Is this going to make my application stand out? Im worried that i didnt put in as many hours and the volunteer coordinator changed like 5 times already, so it will be hard for me to get a stellar LoR.
is it the # of hours that counts or do # of years matter as well? thankss😀

well, # total hours and overall length are both considerations, and it's hard to say which is more important, but i'd say that a long-time commitment with a short hourly demand is probably looked upon more favorably than a short-term commitment with an intense number of hours. there's a spot on AMCAS where you can put the number of hours/week, and then the length of time you were committed. so if you did 2hr/week for 4 years, that's still significantly more time than someone who like 10hrs/week for a semester (i.e. 3 months), even though the per-week hourly commitment is smaller for the former.


While all volunteering is good, and long-term employment can be a plus as well, it should probably be noted that you will still need to have some health-care experience, if you don't already. i'm assuming you were referring to health-related volunteering in your first post... if that's the case, I'd say try not to spread yourself too thin. I agree with the other posters who mentioned that it'd probably be preferable to pick a couple and stick with them for a long time. Alternately, you might pick one you really like and stick with it for a long time, and then sort of experiment and sample widely from all sorts of health care opportunities--perhaps shadowing for a couple weeks here and there in different clinics or something.

hope that helps! best of luck to you!

 

[LizzyM]

ahah yea ok! so it helped you a lot right?? 🙂 I hope this work exp will make my application stronger! oh and why didnt u include the number of hours in the list? cant u just kinda estimate?

It can be very confusing when someone helps out during vacations as well as during the school year. As an example, when I was in college, I often worked 4-10 hours per week (just Saturday) but during school vacations I might work 8-20 hrs each week (I also had a job outside of the family business). You could tally up all the hours and divide by 52 but it can be confusing -- I just think it is easier for an adcom member to find that information in the text than to be misled as to how much you were actually working during the academic year (I had one person who wrote 6/02-8/03: 40 hours per week. It looked like the applicant was working 40 hours per week during an academic year although it was actually only summers. You don't want adcoms to feel like you are misleading them.)