Medical Gap Year- Is Service Abroad ok?

[MusicDOc124]

Hello!

I am a current senior that will be graduating in June of 2021, to apply to medical school in June of 2022, to (hopefully) matriculate in August 2023. I will therefore have 2 gaps years, with one being a real gap year and one being an application year.

For my first gap year, I am very interested in going abroad (COVID-permitting, that is) and I have found it very challenging to find meaningful opportunities abroad. Currently, I have been looking up programs to do service abroad in Latin America (either clinical or non-clinical), but a lot of them seem like "voluntourism". How can I avoid an experience like this? Is there any meaningful service abroad that is not "voluntourism", aside from Peace Corps? I am hoping to do service for 3-6 months, so I would hope that this time commitment would demonstrate to medical schools that I am not just looking for a vacation? I know a lot of medical schools do not like service abroad, so is this a bad idea, or is there a way to make sure I am doing it in an ethical and beneficial way for both myself and the communities I would be serving?

You could just travel for fun. If you do some true backpacking you might learn a good bit not only about yourself, but other people, cultures, ways of living, etc. That in and of itself is beneficial to you as a person and can translate to being beneficial in future practice. During the other periods that you're home, volunteer locally. Give back to your community: soup kitchens, animal shelters, etc. This can continue through the application cycle as well.

I did quite a bit of traveling during a gap I once took. It was the primary discussion in my interviews to both medical school and residency. It's also come up with patients who have sometimes lived in (or been from) places I've traveled through which built a bit of a rapport, at least for the places I spent more time in.

It doesn't have to be all or none, and they don't have to be one and the same. Just my .02.

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[GoSpursGo]

Agree with @MusicDOc124 . Enjoy yourself.

The important thing IMO is that you aren't relying solely on these international experiences to satisfy your clinical experience requirements. If you've got a few weeks on top of a reasonable number of hours done domestically, then you're good.

 

[TheBoneDoctah]

Agree with the above. Not everything you do needs to be directly related to medicine. Travel and learn about other people. These trips could be an amazing topic of discussion in an interview.