Year of unemployment- how to talk about on secondaries?

[raccoon914]

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I have been unemployed this past year and using my time for weekly volunteering at a hospital. I have spent a lot of time this past year submiting job applications (often many a day) and following through with job openings. On secondaries that ask you to detail your activities for the years since graduation or your activities for any time away from full-time employment, should I mention that I have been job searching or focus only on the volunteering I have been doing?

 

[frescoengano]

yes

 

[the duck]

Most definately include the job searching. If "all" you did in the gap year was hospital volunteering, which is pretty standard stuff adcoms are gonna wonder why you didn't do something more with your time off. They will view it as you being lazy. However given the economy at the moment, they will understand your difficulties in finding work. You need to put it in to prove to adcoms you didn't spend all semester practicing your weed smoking or COD playing ability and that you were instead trying to be a productive person.

 

[ILikeDrugs]

Most pre-meds dont even have jobs. They leech off of their mom n dad. I doubt that they'll grill you for not having a job for a small period of time, but will rather look at past employment history as a positive thing. 👍

 

[raccoon914]

Thanks. What do you think of also mentioning that I spent some months of this time studying for the MCAT?

 

[TriagePreMed]

If you were volunteering anywhere over around 35+ hours, you don't need to justify unemployment because you were volunteering full time. You can say that you have always intended to go to med school, and this gap year you chose to do volunteer work.

 

[raccoon914]

Unfortunately, my volunteer work covered nowhere near 35+ hours per week, more like 8 hours (hospital had limited time slots open), so trying to decide the best way to talk about my activities during this time.