<p>I've read a lot of the premed threads here and there seems to be an unwritten rule that competitive med school applicants must have clinic experience. Isn't it irrelevant, though, for pathology? They deal with the surgeon, not the patients. Will med schools understand if I don't have any clinic experience, or will they just automatically reject me? I would much rather spend my extracurricular time helping out a pathologist and doing research.</p>
<p>Keep in mind you still have 4-8 years if you’re in college before you get to decide what type of residency you want to do. Almost all med school students change what they want to throughout med school</p>
<p>You need to have some strong medical EC’s to be accepted into medical school. If you don’t want to do clinicals you should at least have some type of research job or a lab job at a blood bank or something. Take a class in phlebotomy, there is a strong demand for people with at least 1 class in phlebotomy.</p>
<p>Medical schools want you to have clinical experience becasue they want to know that you have an understanding of what you are getting into and not just basing your decision on peer pressure (family) or from watching Greys Anatomy and the rest. “Helping out a pathologist” is clinical experience. You see what the they do in the clinical setting. Anyways, pathologist also deal with patients so its not irrelevent (e.g fine needle aspiration biopsies).</p>
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<p>No, but you still have time volunteer in a hospital or camp (e.g Boggy Creek) or shadow a doctor.</p>
<p>First, even students who want to go into Pathology have to graduate from medical school, and that requires a lot of patient contact.</p>
<p>Second, medical schools have no way of enforcing your professed specialty choice. So if students could write on their essay “I want to be a pathologist” instead of learning about patients, schools would get flooded via this particular backdoor.</p>
<p>Third, some pathologists do interact with patients’ families and such.</p>