<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>I am a parent of a pre-med student. Do you know any medical schools require a specific number of hours of physician shadowing?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Nope - none that I know of have a required number of hours.</p>
<p>UW says 40 hours minimum. People on SDN seem to recommend 100 as ‘usual’</p>
<p>“Minimum hours” or numbers of anything are the wrong way to approach this. Consider what each element of the application is meant to do and work from there. A typical for-credit internship is going to be ~100 hours/semester, so you could use that as a rough estimate of what a given activity ought to have devoted to it. What you get out of that time, however, is what matters most. Quality over quantity…</p>
<p>I have ~150 hours of shadowing from last semester, but I’m only a senior in high school. Will that serve any purpose when applying for medical schools or not?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No. Things done before graduating from high school do not count.</p>
<p>^ Really?!?! ***. </p>
<p>Oh well. Maybe I’ll go back to the same doctor and ask if I can do it again. We got along really well, so hopefully I could. Maybe I am incorporate it into one of my essays as to how I got interested in medicine or something. Who knows. Would that be acceptable?</p>
<p>Putting it in your essay? Sure. Putting it on your app? Not so much.</p>
<p>If you’re a high school senior, you have a lot more hoops to jump through before applying to med school though.</p>