My daughter completed the 2 weeks virtual clinical shadowing program during the summer and I’m wondering how medical schools view this activity ? Do they treat this the same in-person shadowing or less ?
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
What year in high school or college is your daughter?
I will say…at this point, there are opportunities for in person shadowing. That’s my observation. In my opinion, two weeks of virtual shadowing is better than nothing, but I would aim for in person…and for a more lengthy duration.
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She is a junior in college. Yes, she also has a couple of in-person shadowing activities. She also plans to take MCAT in January 2024 and hopefully if she gets a decent score, will apply for medical schools in June 2024.
What she is lacking is the clinical volunteering and I think she is planning to do that after MCAT.
There is a lot assumption from my part, since I’m not actively involved with her schooling and planning for med schools but rather providing support that she needs to plan for her future. I just want learn about the whole process and hopefully can advise her with her career path.
Her college should have a health careers advising office. She can seek help there to determine what’s missing or not in her application potential for medical school.
She needs volunteering with less privileged populations. And not a hit or miss doing it for a week or two. A decent commitment to working with this population.
Does she have any direct patient contact experience? She will need that as well.
It sounds like she plans to apply as a college junior to start medical school immediately after undergrad. I will ask…why? Many many students take a year after undergrad, or two…so they can beef up the extra things that need to be part of a solid medical school application. The average first year med student is in their mid 20’s so clearly plenty who don’t go directly after undergrad school.
@WayOutWestMom what did I miss?
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First, thank you for the great info and advices.
Yes, she plans to apply in June next year if her MCAT score is competitive and I believe she has reached out to Health Professions Advising Office and will need them to help LORs and applications.
Up to date, I think she has volunteered with Food Recovery Network and other organizations during school years for non clinical volunteering. She also has around 200 hours of doctor and clinical shadowing. For research, she spent a whole summer after freshman year working full time (non-pay) for cell-bio lab.
I think what she is lacking the the hospital/hospice volunteer, so I will need to ask her to work on that. She may end up taking a gap year to beef up her application and potentially that will be her back up plan B.
This.
In my opinion, It doesn’t sound like she will be ready to apply because she is lacking crucial “long-term” patient care through clinical volunteering.
Our daughter just finished this process.
She and her sophomore friends volunteered with the Health Professions Advising Center. They ran meetings and organized conferences with community experts/speakers.
They received referrals from staff on low-SES clinics in need of volunteers. Many of the regional clinics required interviews and near-native foreign-language proficiency to be considered.
Our daughter began her clinical experience at a student-run diabetes clinic, in an agricultural community, during her junior year. She also had a lab position at her university and obtained the (very competitive) position because she had had clinical and lab experience as a high school student in a vet’s office and had taken a biomedical course whereby she was required to familiarize herself with the equipment.
At the diabetes clinic, the exams were provided by visiting physicians and medical students who provided free patient care and referrals for farm workers. Our daughter and her clinical friends, spent every weekend volunteering for two years, running intake and labs-vitals, urinalysis, blood draws, (earned phlebotomy certificates) blood pressure, autoclaving and centrifuging everything and learning how to improve patient bedside manner. Plus they had to create and participate in fund-raisers to fund the clinic’s rent/utilities and some medications.
Clinic jobs were rotated such that each volunteer learned an aspect of the clinic: intake/patient interviews, labs, medication side effects, patient aftercare instructions, and wellness. Her summers were also spent volunteering at her clinic.
The summer after her graduation, she traveled to Spain (via a university-sponsored program) to practice patient care in another country and to keep up with her Spanish skills.
Then that Fall, she returned and studied for the test while volunteering at the diabetes clinic for a year. We provided financial support. She got into her schools two years after her BS in neurobiology. At her White Coat ceremony, her 130 class members were overwhelmingly skilled and qualified.
I know this is all probably too much information, but I’m just providing the information so that you and your family knows what is coming and what other students are doing to get into a med school program. It is expensive, exhaustive, and you wont see your daughter while she goes through this process.
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Thank you for the great and details info. It sounded like a long and hard road for all students who choose medicine’s path including my daughter.
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Back to the topic, should my daughter discredit the virtual shadow and continue to look for in-person shadowing ?
This program was offered by UMSOM, so I’m hoping it would carry some weight in term of validity.
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I wouldn’t discredit it! But I would look look for in person opportunities
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Med school adcomms feel that virtual shadowing is an extremely weak activity.
She also has around 200 hours of doctor and clinical shadowing
200 hours of shadowing is overkill. More than she needs to be a competitive applicant.
Clinical exposure is probably the most important EC for pre-meds. Adcomms want to be sure that an applicant wants to work with the chronically sick, injured, mentally ill, elderly demented, physically disabled and the dying AND their families. It’s a tough job and not one that suits everyone.
She needs at least 200+ hours of clinical exposure, either as volunteer or paid employee.
NOTE: while hospice volunteering is usually well regarded by adcomms, most generic hospice volunteering is not clinical. Your daughter needs to examine exactly what her duties are in order to determine if this activity is clinical or not.
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Addendum: A gap year (with or without a reapplication) is NOT a Plan B.
Since almost 2/3s of all med school applicants NEVER get an acceptance, a Plan B is another career which the student would be happy to pursue. It could be in another healthcare field; it could be in a science research lab; or it could be something completely unrelated to science or medicine.
I frequently recommend this site:
Both of my daughters had a Plan B. For one it was medical physics graduate program. For her sister it was a MPH in biostatistics and epidemiology.
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Thank you for the great insights
She will have to look for opportunities with hospital/clinical volunteers.
It’s still early in the process where she still needs to focus on maintaining good GPA and preparing for MCAT. Depending on the test result, she will need to make the decision whether to apply or take a GAP year to strengthen her application. I guess she will need meet with the pre-health advisor at her school to look over her portfolio and give advices on what will be the next steps.
I’m learning more and more about the processes and understand more about the effort to become a doctor.
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Not the best plan. When she submits her application on June 1, 2025, she will only be listing those hours of clinical experience she has already completed. Applications cannot be updated once submitted. It will be difficult to squeeze in 200+ hours of clinical volunteering/paid employment between February and May while finishing her coursework for graduation. Any anticipated hours of activities she lists simply aren’t considered by adcomms.
Also adcomms look more favorably on longitudinal experiences spread out over several years rather than lots of hours crammed in at the last minute.
While it’s important to maintain a strong GPA and score well on the MCAT, those are not the be-all, end-all for med school applications. Not having or not having having enough clinical exposure is just as much an application-killer as have a sub-3.0 GPA.
Adcomms want to see applicants who can multi-task and be successful academically while at the same time engaging in a robust list of other activities. (Because those are skills that med students and residents must have. )
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I thought the OP said this student was taking the MCAT in Jan 2024 and if scores were OK would apply June 2024. That makes this timeline very tight!
Right–thanks for the correction!
It makes the timeline very tight.
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Its the smells that our daughter remembers of the chemicals, blood, bile, urine, cauterizations, antiseptics and people collapsing/fainting that come firstly to her. Some of her classmates couldn’t handle the injections of needles (phlebotomy) to draw blood.
Our daughter was on her rotations at UCSF Medical Center when the first patients with Covid from the cruise ships came into the hospital. She had had grief training while at her Diabetes clinic and learned how to be professional and yet retain a strong bedside manner.
She had also experienced family losses, but nothing prepared her nor her classmates for Covid. Because she had had various grief experiences while multitasking in her clinic, she could take the urgency, hazmat gear, and stress of the pandemic.
Not to pile on more, but those 200 hours of shadowing could have been spent working as a Scribe and getting paid.
Edited to add: The worst part for her? keeping up with the documentation for each patient. It’s like running to catch up to something that always falls behind.
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Thank you all for the great info.
I will have many topics to discuss with D including the plan B, GAP year(s) and ECs.
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In my opinion, clinical shadowing is very much like HS making students do volunteer work. Not terribly useful yet everyone feels like they have to do it. I told my kids don’t bother. Instead use that time to pursue other activities they like.
I think med school cares more about “Why” medicine (because it’s long and no longer that rewarding, they want you to know that before embarking on a 7 to 12 year journey after college. Also they need to know “you can”. Med school is hard, that’s they they care about your preparation and grades. If you struggle in UG, you won’t make it thru med school.
Shadowing won’t show them them “why” and “can” as much as hand-on care, actual job experience, lab research, or some parental influence. Medicine is actually one career where people openly say they are going in due to an immediate family member loving their job. AO/interviewers typically will transfer that feeling as if their own kids said it. Weird.
Now that there are “paid” shadowing experience online, which essentially cheapened that experience. Your kid can do what they want. I would not have mine do this.
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Thank you for great input.
I asked daughter about this program and she said it’s offered by a local public medical school and it’s free. She likes this program since she was able to shadow (virtually) several areas of specialties and sub specialties. She also stated that she has learned about patient evaluations, didactics, as well as incorporating 1-on-1 time with physicians, medical students, and other members of the health care team. She also had other in-person shadow experiences but thought this experience was much more fun and resourceful.
From what I hear, all med school applicants will need a minimum hours of doctor shadowing in addition to other volunteers to be considered. I’m not actively involved with my daughter’s schooling or extra curriculars since high school, since she has decided to be independent. 
She just needs us to write checks and have some inputs every now and then .
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