<p>could someone please tell me what a typical "shadowing" experience is like....is it typical to ask a physician to allow you to shadow them for a certain period of time. if so, how long and how often.....is the student expected to find these opportunities or will the school help as well....</p>
<p>Generally it’s up to the student to be pro-active in finding shadowing and medical volunteer positions by contacting hospitals, physician groups, nursing homes, etc. Schools will not get involved in that. If there’s a pre med club at the school, then the club might help make some arrangements, but that’s not a universal.</p>
<p>Also there seems to be a significant regional variance about the availability of hands on type medical volunteering/shadowing in publicly funded hospitals. In my town, NONE of the public hospitals or VA hospitals will accept undergrad student volunteers due to HIPAA concerns. However, this doesn’t appear to be an issue everywhere. YMMV.</p>
<p>Shadowing can last for as little as a week or as long as a year or more. It depends upon the situation and individuals involved.</p>
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Yep. Shadowing is the norm where we are in Texas. No issues at all. She just called on local doc’s she or I knew. Programs in place for hospital volunteers over 16, too. She did a summer in high school. Saw a lot and did a lot. In Memphis, where my D attended UG, I believe she performed surgery. 
I’m JK. But others have said in their areas none of that can happen.</p>
<p>Totally depends on you and what you’re looking for. For the most part, like WOWMom said, it’s up to you to make it happen. Popular ways to “make it happen” (both worked for me) are: </p>
<p>1) Shadow family friends, your parents’ friends, your friends’ parents, etc who are doctors or who know doctors, thus providing you an “in” to the medical field. I’ve found that these contacts often work best to provide you with more “quantity” of shadowing (ie, 8-20h per physician total) because it seems like many of these physicians are “doing someone a favor” by allowing you to shadow them and might not be looking to make a big impact on your development as a future physician.</p>
<p>2) Go out of your way to contact physicians you don’t know. This could be through your premed society, through random phone calls to clinics, or through “cold” emails sent to friendly faces (this was my approach). I sent out ~6 emails and received 2 positive replies (and a few “well, I can’t, but try this…” replies) with offers to shadow. I picked a day and went in for the afternoon (1PM-4PM), and when they offered to let me come back next week, I took them up on it. From my experience, it seems like physicians you just randomly contact are more open to a mentoring role because they seem to be more focused on teaching rather than doing you/someone a favor.</p>
<p>*It is worthwhile to mention, though, that the docs who are family friends are all in private practice, and the ones that I randomly contacted are professors of clinical/surgical medicine at a big state teaching hospital (my university’s medical school, in fact). So the trends I noticed may be trends of private practice v teaching hospital, and not actually the result of how I contacted them (through friends, or randomly, respectively). You’ll just have to test it out!</p>
<p>Additionally, there are a few “schools of thought” about how to go about shadowing:</p>
<p>1) Quantity: Shadow many fields for short periods of time (<20h) to get lots of exposure to various fields and careers of physicians.</p>
<p>2) Quality: Shadow one or two physicians for an extended period of time to get lots of exposure to how their individual practices are run, what types of patients they see, how they interact with their staff, bureaucracy patients and providers face, and gain a better understanding of the diseases they encounter.</p>
<p>I went with a hybrid model, shadowing 3 physicians in different fields for about 25h each (otorhinolaryngology, orthopaedic surgery, pulmonology) as well as shadowing 2 physicians for >200h each (hematology/oncology, surgical oncology). I learned markedly different things with each of the physicians and would eagerly repeat this strategy if I somehow had to restart being an undergrad.</p>
<p>*I should note, too, that my experience seems to be far from typical. Finding 475+ hours is a major challenge, but gaining meaningful exposure to the medical field was a priority for me as an undergrad. Many successful candidates have ~100h of shadowing on their applications. I just happened to find two phenomenal physicians who I developed wonderful, mentoring relationships with–so I wanted to continue shadowing them!</p>
<p>wow. that was an amazingly helpful post, kristin. THANKS SO MUCH!!</p>
<p>that really was helpful Kristin. </p>
<p>Do you get a signature from each doctor and the number of hours that you shadowed them? Is that required? my son is going to shadow his first doctor Wednesday. he is a friend and will be doing plastic surgery.</p>
<p>Smile, no formal documentation required. I get the impression medical schools just take it on faith when you say you’ve done x amount of hours. Seems like it’s typically just another “check” as in “did this kid shadow?” unless the circumstances indicate that the shadowing experience was exceptional or noteworthy or the physician wrote a quality recommendation letter.</p>
<p>Is your son the planner/calendar type? When I wrote that I was shadowing Dr Whoever in my planner, when I was done I just wrote in parentheses how many hours I was there and repeated for subsequent weeks. Then when it came time to update the ol resume, it was easy to just count up the hours. I chose to round down to the nearest 5, for what it’s worth (ie, if I added up 278 I recorded it on my resume as 275).</p>
<p>You might suggest that your son take a few minutes at the end of the shadowing experience to write briefly about it in case he’s asked later (if it’s quality work, he likely will be). Being able to say “I watched a fibula free flap reconstruction” is a lot more convincing than “I watched a surgery.” If it’s a long term thing, recording little anecdotes (one of my docs has a great story involving a lesson in compassion from one of his profs), noting observations, following patient progress, etc will be tremendously helpful for future writing and discussing.</p>
<p>Happy to help. Bet he’ll have a great time! If the friend offers to let him return, I’d encourage him to take him up on the offer. He’ll likely find that his second time with that doc is a lot more exciting than the first because he’ll already know some of “the ropes” (like how to put on a cap/mask/shoe covers, where he can stand, if he’s allowed to ask questions, what they do for lunch breaks, etc).</p>
<p>thanks for the advice. i believe he said it is breast surgery that he will be observing tomorrow.</p>