What kind of volunteer work will help me decide about medical school?
Any hospital will have a volunteer office – some still call it “candy-striping,” after the pink and white striped coats once issued to volunteers. Patients are on “nursing stations,” so see if you can volunteer “on the nursing station.” I recall when I did this, I was interested in contact with patients (wheeling folks around the hospital in wheelchairs), but I was disappointed that a lot of my duties were xeroxing charts (for patients who were transferring to other facilities.) As it turned out, though, that was awesome, because I read the charts while I was xeroxing them and on the way to and from the xerox room. About every fifth word I had to look up in my pocket Stedman’s medical dictionary. Eventually the charts started to make sense. At the end of the year I spent volunteering, I had nearly a complete medical education, in terms of what is done in hospitals. Medical school just rounded out the why and the how.
Not sure if you’ll find this relevant, but… I’m taking an evening EMT-Basic class now as a way to see if some sort of nursing/paramedic career change might be a good fit. I’m not looking to enter med school, but there are more than a few other folks (high school, college and above) taking the class to feel out a medical career; they tell me having an EMT certification is looked upon favorably by med school admissions folks. The course is offered through a local community college with a connection to an area hospital, three nights a week from October to March, with clinicals (ride-alongs with local units, basically) on a couple of weekends, so works perfectly with a fulltime day job or daily school schedule. Total tuition was about $75, plus $60 for a couple of textbooks, and assuming I pass the state tests, time invested to get certified at an entry level will be slightly less than 5 months. In this area, once you have the Basic certification, all of the county EMS services are happy
My sister spent a year after undergrad as a “scribe,” which means that she worked in a hospital, following doctors around and writing down their diagnoses and prescriptions and whatnot. That might be slightly wrong, but that was my understanding of it. Anyway, at the end of it, she had the vocabulary (not the medical knowledge, mind you) of a third-year medical student, as well as a year of practical (and paid) work in a hospital environment, on a number of different wings of the hospital (peds, ER, etc.). I know you have your grad school schedule, and don’t have the time to commit to another job, but it’s something to think about. And it might help someone else who reads this and is considering medicine. My sister’s now in her first year at UVA med school.
I volunteered at a couple of different places: 1. ER: fun, exciting (trauma cases), kind of crazy people. 2. Ward: hanging out with the nurses, talking with patients, pushing patients to radiology, far less to see than in the ER. 3. Practical Anatomy Workshop: Many medical schools will have something like this. It’s a place where surgeons can come and talk with surgical instrument makers and practice using the new surgical instruments on cadavers. This is where I met my pathology mentor and began shadowing him and seeing what his in-office job was like. Basically I decided to become a pathologist after working with this guy (I didn’t know what one was before or what they did). So if you’re near a medical school that has one, I’m sure they would be happy to have you volunteer. My job there was to set up for the workshops and clean up.
