Hello all, I am a rising sophomore and I am really interested in medicine. I feel like there is more to do, but I can’t seem to find it. My passion has always been with helping people/animals so I love community service, but I want to do more.
What I have done so far:
Teaching kids in Costa Rica for a month
2 week medicine program at Georgetown
Working at a Dog shelter
My plan for the rest of high school:
Starting National Beta Club
Going to more selective research and introductory medicine classes over the summer
Volunteering at UCLA Hospital (after showing people around for 100 hours you can help doctors assess things like head trauma)
Shadowing doctors over the summer
I plan to continue with the things I was doing before, but I really want to do more with medicine. Any ideas?
You will probably have more impact if you become involved in one or two activities and sustain them rather than collecting a bunch of brief/varied experiences. If you work in a research lab, for example, you might start of with relatively mundane tasks but if you devote enough time to understanding the research and contributing to it, you will usually be given increasingly important tasks to do over time. Choosing one of the things on your list and getting very involved in it will probably be more fulfilling in the long run.
I think your best bet is to do the volunteering at the hospital and get to the point where you can be more involved int the actual medicine. Colleges look for quality and commitment, not quantity.
Unless you are applying to a BS/MD program don’t get too caught up in Shadowing and even Research…those are things you have to do for med school, not undergrad. You dont’ major in pre-med…you major in something like Biology/Chemistry/Psychology/whatever you want as long as you take the med school pre-req classes.
I think volunteering at a hospital is good as it is community service and it lets you know what the medical environment is like.