Maximizing Summer

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
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My D is a current college Soph and is pursuing premed. From what I’ve learned, she is weak in applicable EC/clinical experiences/shadowing. She did volunteer at a local hospital last summer, but it was a disappointing experience as the nursing supervisors had nothing for her to do during her shift (and she wasn’t proactive enough to make the situation better). She is in some college clubs that do a little community volunteering. She has 2 years of lab research experience. That’s about it. How does she make the most of her summer before Junior year? Take 8 weeks of training to become a CNA and then work for 2 months in a nursing home? Volunteer in a nursing home?

On this forum I’ve read about volunteering/working in clinical settings with the elderly, the disabled, hospice settings. Other than nursing homes/rehab centers, I don’t know where to look for these opportunities. In addition to volunteering, she will need to earn some money this summer to help pay for the next year’s schooling. It would be ideal if she could work somewhere that might also give her some helpful experiences.

She also doesn’t know how to get shadowing experiences. We know very few physicians, and the one she contacted won’t take shadowing students due to HIPA laws.

We live in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area, but I just don’t know how to help her find applicable experiences. Her experience trying to volunteer last summer also showed that it isn’t as easy as we thought to volunteer. It took about 6 weeks to make it through the volunteer application and training process. Other places she called weren’t taking volunteers.

Any practical help?

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Comment #1–This is your daughter’s job-not yours! She is the one who needs to hunt up the opportunities. She’s an adult and an adult who is seeking the privilege of serving as a physician to her fellow humans. If she can’t assert herself enough to be proactive about this, perhaps she needs some additional time to mature before she applies for med school.

Now some suggestions about where to find clinical opportunities—

Hospice centers, Alzheimer units at adult living complexes, cancer treatment centers, stand-alone day surgery centers, dialysis centers, group homes for the mentally or physically disabled, county public health clinics, neighborhood free clinics, Healthcare for the Homeless (or whatever your local equivalent is called), Planned Parenthood, summer or after school programs for disabled or autistic children, abuse/rape hotlines.

She should consider looking outside of her suburban home community for volunteer opportunities and working with patient populations that are significantly different than those familiar to her own (limited) experience. Get outside her comfort zone. Her (future) patients will come from all walks of life, in an wide assortment of ethnicities, belief systems. socio-economic circumstances and life experiences. One of the bad things about medicine as a career (IMO as the mother of two female physicians) is that physicians are constantly exposed to the very worst of humanity and the seamiest side of life.

She doesn’t need a CNA to work in a nursing home. She can start out as a nutrition assistant (requires no training, minimum wage job). If the staff feels she’s doing a good job after several months, the nursing home will usually offer to pay for her CNA training.

Another option would be working as a home healthcare aide. Requires little or no training.

She can certainly pursue a CNA (or EMT or phlebotomist certificate) if she wants. Just be aware that having the credential means nothing without hands-on job or volunteer experience.

Again, mom, this is HER job, not yours…

There is no easy way to do this.

There are 3 approaches to finding shadowing opportunities:

  1. cold calling/cold emailing. (Expect a whole lot of rejections before someone says yes, )

  2. meeting physicians through clinical volunteering or clinical research situations and asking them. A slower process since it will take 6+ months to get to know the doctor(s), but usually more productive than cold calling since physicians will be more comfortable allowing an individual to be around their patients once they know that person and know they’re responsible, mature, won’t violate patient confidentiality and is not a crazy person.

  3. networking. Your d should start by asking her own PCP. If that person says “no”, ask if they can suggest someone who might allow shadowing. Keep asking for suggestions & referrals. Have her contact any acquaintances/faith community members you know who have a physician in their family, ask, If no, ask for suggestions.

HINT: HIPAA is mostly an excuse to say no politely, although some practices & hospitals do require clinical observers/volunteers to have HIPAA training before they can be on-site. HIPAA training takes about 6 hours and can be done on-line.


I doubt 1 summer of clinical exposure will be sufficient. Your D needs to find something near her college campus and get additional clinical experience.

Since your D lacks community service, this summer would be a great time to get started on that too.
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Thanks, WayOutWestMom. I expected the comments about this being HER responsibility, and not mine :slight_smile:
You are totally right. I usually suggest/research options and let her pursue them, but I realize she needs to take more initiative. The road to being a physician is long and hard. She is thinking admission to med school is mostly about grades and test scores, and I’m trying to help her see that it encompasses so much more. I’ve learned a lot from reading CC and this forum.

I don’t know how to “quote” from an above post…

"Now some suggestions about where to find clinical opportunities—

Hospice centers, Alzheimer units at adult living complexes, cancer treatment centers, stand-alone day surgery centers, dialysis centers, group homes for the mentally or physically disabled, county public health clinics, neighborhood free clinics, Healthcare for the Homeless (or whatever your local equivalent is called), Planned Parenthood, summer or after school programs for disabled or autistic children, abuse/rape hotlines."

Do the places you’ve listed above ^^ typically take volunteers or would they employ someone with no previous experience? And does it count as “clinical experience” if she is working in the kitchen, passing out meal trays, cleaning, or doing some other entry-level type task?

She is starting to network more at school with other pre-med students and pre-med clubs, so I anticipate she’ll be learning from others how they have obtained this experience.

As always, I appreciate your help.

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To use the quote function:

[ quote ] text [ /quote ] but remove the spaces inside the square brackets.

Almost all the places I listed will take untrained volunteers. If training is required, the site will provide it. ( I volunteer at the local cancer treatment center and I had zero prior medical volunteering experience when I applied.)

Kitchen work, cleaning, delivering meal trays and similar jobs are not clinical experience since her contact with patients/clients would be extremely limited or non-existent. For clinical experience, the LizzyM “smell test” applies–“If you’re close enough to smell the patient, it’s clinical experience.”

RE: jobs. Both my daughters needed to work in the summer to earn money to help pay their expenses. Both worked at a variety of entry level service jobs (summer camp counselor, lifeguard/swimming instructor, retail sales clerk, gas station attendant, waitress, house/pet sitter–eventually they landed jobs as lab lackeys/ research assistants) in the summer and fit in their volunteering around their jobs. Clinical volunteering isn’t necessarily full time.

Grades and MCAT scores only keep an application from getting tossed out of consideration. It’s ECs that get an applicant invited to interview.

You can show her these articles:

[AAMC Report: Medical School Admissions: More than Grades and Test Scores](https://www.aamc.org/download/261106/data/aibvol11_no6.pdf)

[Top 3 Reasons Why Medical School Applications Are Rejected](http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/medical-school-admissions-doctor/2012/02/06/top-3-reasons-medical-school-applications-are-rejected)

[Kaplan Reports Latest Trends in Medical School Admissions 2014](http://www.kaptest.com/blog/med-school-pulse/2014/11/19/2014-kaplan-survey-shows-latest-trends-medical-school-admissions/)

[Vanderbilt Medical School: Selection Factors in Admissions](https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/md-admissions/selection-factors)

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^^agree with the above. If she’s even experienced sickness within her family or herself, that’s enough to write about the first hand toll illness takes on a loved one and family. Research is good. Doing other things health related are fine also.

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Thank you. Those are great articles and I will share them with my D.

preppedparent: Yes, she certainly has had her own first-hand experience being treated by physicians. She had major surgery with a week of hospitalization when she was 17, with lots of doctor appointments throughout her childhood.

WayOutWestMom: You mentioned that you volunteer at a Cancer treatment center. What is it that you do? What are the typical tasks given to an unskilled volunteer? At the hospital my D was volunteering at last summer, she delivered water and ice to the patients, and that was about all they had for her to do. She asked what else they needed, and nothing else was offered. They were long, boring volunteer shifts. And the lead time (application process) was so long that by the time she was placed and learned how little there was to do, the summer was half-way over without time to start the process again somewhere else.

She is exploring some opportunities to volunteer with the underprivileged this semester at school…things that would require a regular commitment. Helping at a homeless shelter/food bank doesn’t give her the clinical experience, however.

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I’m a librarian so I work in the patient information center, providing resource materials for cancer patients and their families. (And often just lending a sympathetic ear to very worried and frightened people.)

This pretty typical.

When D1 volunteered in a local ED (emergency dept.), those were her jobs too. But she appointed herself to do additional chores. Beside delivering water and blankets, she chatted with patients while they waited, found magazines & toys for children waiting, held cranky babies for exhausted parents, checked w/the triage nurse to gauge how long patients might expect to wait, alerted the triage nurse if she saw issues arising in any of the waiting patients. (Like one whose BP cratered and passed out. And one whose fever skyrocketed while waiting.) During down times (which are few & far between on Friday nights in the ED), she chatted up the nurses, PAs, EMTs and ED techs asking about their jobs and asking if she could assist them in any way. Eventually, after she proved herself calm, level headed and professional, the ED staff started letting her be present in treatment rooms. One Friday she helped hold a patient while the attending did a spinal tap. (She also got exposed to viral meningitis.) D1 went on to become an EMT-I, volunteered on Mountain Search & Rescue and did training rotations in several hospitals. (Including one inside a state medium security prison and a psychiatric hospital where she helped triage and treat actively psychotic patients. Those were eye-openers…)

D1’s best friend behaved similarly and eventually was allowed to be in treatment rooms in the ED. One memorable night when there had a mass casualty event (multiple shooting), she was asked to “glove up” and assist. She held her finger on a bleeder in some guy’s brain until the doctors could get other more critical wounds managed. (BTW, her story made for a great for a great PS-- “I want to do more than just press here.” BF did get accepted into medical school, but in the end declined her acceptance. She now has a PhD and teaches biochemistry at the med school.)

When D2 worked in Child’s Life as a 16 year old, after she had completed her tasks (cleaning up the play room and disinfecting toys, taking the reading cart around to rooms), she chatted up the nursing and therapy staff, asking how she could help them. Eventually she was allowed to hold babies while they underwent infusions and was allowed to observe treatment procedures. When D2 volunteered in a neuro rehab unit during college, she spent most of her time helping patients work on memory and motor skills–like playing Old Maid or drawing pictures. During down time, she chatted up the staff, including OTs, PTs, rec and respiratory therapists, nursing staff and the neuro residents/attending on rounds. She “asked really good questions” (direct quote from the chief neuro resident who was really impressed by her and became her champion w/ the attendings) and she was eventually invited to sit on the weekly neuro dept case reviews. (Ironically, D2 just texted me that the attending on her neuro rotation just told her she’s the “best medical student of the batch” this year. Alas! It appears despite her love of all things brains, she’s going into a surgical specialty.)

Not that any of this happened overnight. It took time (several months) and effort on their parts to make their jobs meaningful.

The take away–your daughter can’t just allow herself to be told to sit in the corner. She needs to be pro-active about doing more. She needs to be friendly and outgoing–even if that’s not her natural demeanor-- talk to everyone and ask good questions whenever the chance arises.

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Great advise. I tried to encourage that last summer, but the one shift she was given was a Saturday morning on an sleepy extended-care floor. Not much activity. She doesn’t want to repeat that placement. I’m hoping she has matured over the past year and understands that she needs to make the most of every experience. She’s friendly, but not out-going, talkative, or assertive…skills she’ll need to develop.

I appreciate your help.