<p>I currently intern at a hospital in San Diego (Palomar Medical) and part time at Redcross Blood bank. </p>
<p>I am a anthropology major looking to apply for admission to the B.S. program at UCLA, CAL, DAVIS, and several other UC's. I will be applying to Med school as well. My question is, how important is it to do extra volunteer work? I sent out applications to several volunteer opportunities across my area, and just now I am receiving invitations for interviews. Do I need more than what I already have going on?</p>
<p>I will also be applying for student council and I am in the honors club on campus. My gpa is a ~3.6-3.7</p>
<p>(one of the potential volunteer programs is San Diego Museum of Man)</p>
<p>I would say that any extracurriculars / volunteer work in general doesn’t hold nearly as much weight in transfer admissions as it does when the UC’s evaluate freshmen applications. I think that’s because of two factors – one, being that the UC’s have less time to evaluate transfer applications because they start first with the freshmen apps, which there are many more of. And two, because there’s more of a substantial academic background by which to evaluate transfers than for high school students.</p>
<p>Regardless of the reasoning though, keep in mind that only four of the nine undergrad UC’s (Cal, UCLA, UCI, and Merced) have a holistic review process that even factors things like the personal statement, extracurriculars, volunteer work, etc in the review process. All of the other UC’s will exclusively rely on your academic history to evaluate you. Also, I would say that simply listing extracurricular / volunteer work in general isn’t going to strengthen your application much. I think if you want to use your non-academic endeavors to your advantage in UC transfer admissions you really have to discuss them in your personal statements. It tells the admission officer a lot more about you as an applicant if you discuss how you actually participated in those things, especially if you can link it to how it may have contributed to making you a better student or more well-rounded person. </p>
<p>Adding additional volunteer work won’t help for the five UC’s that don’t factor it in for admission. For the others, if you’ve already applied for this cycle, I doubt adding anything else on the application update is going to significantly help you. It’s a bit too late. Admittedly, I don’t know much about med school admissions, but I’d imagine if you can find something that’s relevant to the medical field it may help you later on. Unfortunately, the UC admission process is more focused on academics, in a way that its weighted disproportionately more than any of the other areas on the application. My impression is that med school admissions is similar with the MCAT and undergrad GPA; however, I think that it’s so competitive that anything else you can add, without compromising the aforementioned, is probably going to be worth it.</p>