Of course you can start too early. It takes maturity to deal with people who are likely having the worst day of their lives, or are accompanying a loved one on the worse day of THEIR lives. I asked the attending to remove a group of HS kids shadowing a physician when they were in my parents hospital room. My parent was dying; whatever pedagogy could be communicated at that moment was overshadowed by my family’s need for privacy.
I had my own ER admission/medical crisis a few years back- and the attending in the ER was the one to kick a college kid who was “volunteering” out of my cubicle.
It takes a lot of seasoning and maturity and TIME for someone to be able to handle a bloody, gross, or unsettling medical situation. Give your kid that time. NO high school kid needs to be in an ER or with a dying patient who has not asked for hospice or volunteer support. Yes, you can start too early. College is plenty of time for clinical exposure; jumping the gun with a 16 year old? That is very hard on the patients.
In addition to needing HIPAA certification of some sort, I imagine? And many clinics - and insurance companies - have medical translators on staff and in some places it is requirement that professional medical translation be provided to patients who request it, so they already have that covered. My husband who is not proficient in English always gets a medical translator for his appointments. These are professionals trained in medical terminology and who have HIPAA clearance due to confidentiality issues. To be honest, I don’t think he would be at all comfortable with a teenager being present during his exams and in speaking about his personal health concerns with his physician.
There may be some clinics that are desperate and will take volunteers. But I would not assume that clinics are clamoring for this sort of help.
There are many other opportunities for volunteer translators, however. Refugee services? I volunteered for Kiva for several years which was fun. I get she’s interested in med school and a medical career, so maybe there are some options, but I’d cast a wider net if she wants to use her language skills for community service in some manner.
Any city which has had an influx of refugees over the last year is going to have wonderful opportunities for translators. My own city is training and welcoming HS kids as translators to help parents register their kids for school, sign up for English language classes, learn how to navigate the public library system (which offers everything from free internet, computer classes, citizenship classes, the ability to borrow tools and equipment, etc.) and fill out job applications.
Medical translation in the hospitals and clinics near me is a professional role done by adults.
The mania for developing a med-school worthy application package at age 16 worries me. HS kids do NOT need research, patient/clinical contact, etc.
Are candy stripers still a thing? Maybe a bilingual candy striper role? Or I can imagine a children’s hospital liking a young person who can entertain and play with non-English speaking children in their care?
Yes. And I am guessing we are talking about a 14-15 year old? This conversation is way too premature. This student should take the most rigorous course load that she can handle and manage to get high grades in, while doing extracurricular activities and having a normal teenage life. A simple visit with the guidance counselor at high school (or middle school) should make this not too difficult.
I am perplexed by the emphasis on FL in this thread. I see no issue here. The student will have the necessary FL requirements to get into any college in the country. She speaks six languages. She will take an AP test, or take IB classes, or whatever needs to be done.
My son’s friend, aged 22, just started med school. He had good grades in high school. He had fun and played lacrosse. He was no superstar student, although very bright. He hit it out of the park at a well regarded and rigorous LAC, but it wasn’t WAPS. He got into med school by doing the things a college student needs to do get into med school. He certainly didn’t do those things while in high school.
Most hospitals no longer offer candy striper programs due to covid, but also HIPAA and insurance liability issues.
Medical translation requires a specialized certification. Medicine and science has its own specialized vocabulary that is not commonly used in everyday conversations. Additionally, specialized cultural training is part of the certification process because the translator needs to be able to broach sensitive topics that may be taboo/difficult to talk about. (Think sexual assault, drug use, mental health, domestic violence, child abuse, etc.)
Even the low resource hospitals that my daughter works at have certified medical translation available–even on the overnight shift. It’s a legal requirement. Using non-certified translators opens a hospital or clinic up to serious legal consequences.
No clinic or hospital is going to allow a 15 year old to do medical translation.
Agree that all this planning is very premature for a 14-15 year old student who thinks they want to go to med school someday. Having strong academics in high school is fine. So is speaking multiple languages. But very little of what a student does during high school has any impact on that student’s ability to get into med school.
I also want to mention to the OP that med school admission is only partly based on academics and test scores. Mission fit, leadership, teamwork and interpersonal communication skills, cultural competency and other social skills are just as important as academics when it comes to med school admissions. Medicine is patient-centered service job.
High school is the time for your child to start working on these skills as well as developing their base level understanding of biology, chemistry, math and physics.
@blossom I understand your point and agree. I was not even thinking about the ER. I was thinking more of a community clinic or Drs office that may serve non native speakers but doesn’t have enough translation services. My larger point being that there are ways to improve your profile for college, get experience for the future, get an idea if a field is right/wrong for a kid that is driven and has high capabilities.
@way That makes sense and I appreciate the clarification. An alternative may be to check in to Medical Translation certification. Similar to kids who I have heard of becoming EMTs in high school. Some kids are different and achieve other worldly things at early ages. I know a kid playing Varsity football at a prep school in 8th grade and already getting college looks. I know a professor at Princeton who scored a perfect SAT score at 13/14. He knew he wanted to be a mathematician very early. This kid may be one of those exceptional kids.
A Google search of eligibility for certification in medication interpretation seems to indicate that you must be 18 and possess a high school diploma. It is possible this varies by state - I am certainly not particularly knowledgeable so can’t say.
And it seems we are digging very deeply into an issue that the OP has never expressed any interest in whatsoever. I agree it could be nice to use her language skills in some way, IF she wants to, and she is interested in a medical career so some medical EC could be helpful to her, but at no point did she indicate that her daughter would be interested in medical interpretation as a EC.
If she is, however, a little research would appear to indicate that it is not a viable option for a high school student.
I was going to chime in that medical translation is a certified, professional job so no HS student would be allowed to do that - but I see several people already did that.
However someone who speaks several languages could do some non medical tasks, such as help people navigate the corridors or simply giving directions, wishing people welcome in their native language to put them at ease when they arrive - all of this in the welcome/entrance area. At a nursing home, chatting with residents or working with the music therapist to teach/learn songs in some patients’ native language could also be organized. At a refugee shelter, planning activities or offering tutoring for kids whose first language you speak. Helping their parents register kids at the right school or for swimming lessons or explaining what the free lunch program is (not all schools will do it and have time to explain it to parents), sometimes navigating urban places that are unfamiliar. Some ways of using one’s language skills are appropriate (and useful volunteering) and some are inappropriate (such as hanging out in patients’ rooms).
Being around a variety of people who need help is useful for someone who wants to be a health care professional, as is being in a health care setting (not because the kid will do anything medical but because they’ll have a better idea of the working environment and may be able to make an appointment with health care professionals. Experiences help kids change their minds or figure out what they want. Shadowing or interviewing doctors, nurses, therapists… can also be a good way to see what the job really is about (lots more vomit, fewer fantastic/once in a lifetime surgeries and interesting cases to “solve” than on TV shows :p).
If she’s 14, she has plenty of time to change her mind wrt becoming a doctor. It’s more likely than not!
However, the volunteering experiences will always be useful to her personally, regardless of college or medical goals.
The issue seems to be the availability of suitably advanced course offerings in a language she knows (so that taking them would be of educational benefit and not appear to be grade grubbing), or enough courses in a new language, for those colleges that (unlike UCs or CSUs) would not just accept high enough AP scores in known languages for their foreign language requirements or recommendations.
If you are asking for you daughter who is still in HS. My advice to you is focus on HS first. Get into college. Focus on doing well there before even thinking about med school. There as a kid in my lab who was a UCLA Regent Scholar (back in 1992 when that was a full ride) who failed every bio class he took the first year, got put on AP (great in HS, not great in college) and ended up losing his scholarship and almost had a mental breakdown until he decided to change major to PolSci and quit our lab. He did recover, but medicine was never in his cards.
Most “elite” colleges will “encourage” you to retake classes even if you already have AP credits. Some of them offer an Honors version of that class and encourage students who had “regular” classes or AP credits to give that track a try. For example, UCLA offers Honors Freshman chemistry which is essentially a seminar class in disguise and there is no chance of getting placed into that class without having done AP chem or a regular CC level chem class. Everyone enrolled in Honors chem happily forgo their chem credit for that special learning experience.
Having said that, I went to school with too many “pre-meds” to know most of them never made it to the application stage 3 years later.
Medicine is a long road. Best take it a step at a time.