<p>I volunteer 2 hours a day at a hospital and by the time I apply to medical school I'll have 4,000 volunteer hours. I do those also because I enjoy it so don't bash me about being a "resume whore." Do you think this would make a huge difference when applying to medical school?</p>
<p>The difference between 0 and 4000 is huge. The difference between 2000 and 4000 is not huge. So, yes, volunteering is a big deal. 4000 hours is not necessarily as cost effective as 2000, even if one assumes that they are the same quality of activity. I think 500 hours of volunteering is plenty, but if you really enjoy doing it then by all means do as much as you like.</p>
<p>^^^500? I was reading on sdn about how after 100-200 hours adcoms don’t really care anymore. My experiences as a volunteer have been terrible. Its so boring. I pretty much sit there with absolutely nothing to do. Every hour, I would go around asking the nurses/doctors/patients if there was something I could do, but they would just tell me there was no work. IF someone needed help, I would jump at the chance of helping them, because it gave me a way to pass my time. Other than that, I would just go to espn.com on my phone and catch up on my favorite teams…Over the summer, I spent 3.5 hours/4 hours a day at the hopsital on espn. After 3.5 hours, even espn.com can get boring.</p>
<p>Sad thing is I volunteered in the ER, the surgery departments, the outpatient clinic, and some other random departments. there was no work for volunteer in any of these departments. Maybe it was because I was volunteering in a suburban hospital, where things are usually very slow…</p>
<p>It’s because you’re not actively finding things to do. Just go talk to a patient.</p>
<p>One thing I figured out real quick about volunteering at hospitals/etc. is that if you don’t actively search out things to do or talk to people, it’s really easy for everyone to ignore you completely and just let you sit there.</p>
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<p>^^^ I thought I was actively trying to find things to do, because I would:</p>
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<p>I usually had to ask the head nurse or a doctor permission before I was allowed to go into patients rooms. With the doctor’s/head nurse’s permission I would go into the rooms and ask the patients if they needed anything. Usually if the patients wanted anything (like water, milk, juice, food), I’d have to go again and ask them doctor/head nurse permission if I can give them what they wanted. But that was about as much patient interaction that I was allowed to have…</p>
<p>I hate doing activities just because medical schools “want” to see them, but volunteering was def. one of them.</p>
<p>Asking around “Do you have anything to do?” isn’t a particularly active thing to do. Ask the nurse for permission once for a generic room permission, and then just start visiting with patients. Ask them how they’re doing. Strike up a conversation. Meet their families. With their permission, take some photos and writing something admiring and e-mail it to them.</p>
<p>^ thanks for the tips, I will probably try to do that next summer, when I start up volunteering again.</p>
<p>^ Honestly, as was said, simply “asking for work” isn’t being proactive. I’d probably give you the same response on the ED because I don’t have time to explain every task to you. We get that you’re volunteering your time and not getting paid but honestly if it’s going to take us longer to find you and tell you we need a wheelchair than it would for us to do it ourselves or send our preceptee, nursing student, or CNA to track one down, we’re just going to have one of the staff do it.
Additionally, if you have your phone out while I’m working and I see it, there’s no way I’m going to ask you to do something for one of my pts. You’re telling me right there that I can’t trust you with my patient. The last thing I need is to be doing service recovery and then talking to the charge or global nurse about it later b/c you weren’t attentive to a patient’s nonmedical needs. It reflects poorly on myself (b/c I used poor judgment in asking you to help), you, the charge/global RN, and the hospital/dept as a whole. My advice would be to get in there and find out what the staff really need. E.g., in the ED, find out if the would like a volunteer in Triage to grab wheelchairs, ask a tech to show you how to stock and then keep carts full throughout the shift, ask if it’s possible for you to take vitals (either in Triage or maybe in a lower-acuity care unit), etc. Basically, find out what tasks would be of help to the techs and do them. Even though you probably report directly to the Charge RN (as a volunteer), your job is really more as an assistant to the ED Techs in most EDs I’ve worked in, since your skills are more akin to theirs and they often do the most basic procedures and so can offer you their scutwork (i.e., stocking, tracking down wheelchairs, and, to a slightly lesser degree, vitals).</p>
<p>Plenty in the sense of more than the acceptable level that adcoms want. I meant all volunteering, not just clinical.</p>
<p>4,000 hrs of hospital volunteering sounds miserable, especially if it’s not with some specialized training like ER tech or working as an EMT-basic. Do it if it makes you happy but it certainly isn’t necessary to do that much. A couple hundred hours is plenty and as others have said, it doesn’t have to all be medically related…non-medical volunteer work, like disaster relief, habitat for humanity, tutoring are all very positively looked upon, and generally allow you to make more of a difference than just following people around in a hospital</p>