you are essentially telling someone who has gone through a crap ton of school, that you could do their job, years in advance and without the rigorous training and pressure they themselves were under.
Your surgeons might be passive and really appreciate the valuable time you save them, but this should be more of your leg-up later on clinicals. Not something you mention in interview/Application. I think the rejection from volunteer crops. speaks for itself, and you explicitly know the reasons why, the legality. Why would you ever want to advertise something within illegal ramifications, especially in a clinical setting ?
Keep those awesome experiences to yourself. For now.
1.) That was one person. If he was an ADCOM at a particular school it would matter.
2.) No one can make that assumption that you were too tired to sight-see. you can thank the premeds who took pictures with beers in their hands that were not so tired.
3.) red flag since you are applying to US schools.
4.) Best point in your post. Encapsulates a ton.
5. no one stays that long, you are absolutely right.
Among many of these points is that not everyone can afford to go on these trips, I think the best term to sum it up is a "glorified vacation". I know someone who delivered babies in Thailand. He was relentless this would make him a bright shining star in the view of medical schools. He is doing accounting now.
Well, thank you for denigrating every single surgical technologist, particularly those of us who choose to volunteer our vacation time to help other people. Who exactly do you think takes care of basically everything behind the scenes in operating rooms? Do you think surgeons set up their own cases???
My profession is not a joke, and the average pre-med who wants to go on a mission cannot do it. In fact, the average medical student cannot do it. It requires a ton of specialized training and knowledge. I have spent years working in hospitals and surgical centers doing everything from trauma surgery, huge neuro cases, ruptured AAAs, to ENT, orthopedics, and pretty much any surgical case you've ever heard of. When there is no resident or physician's assistant, I first-assist and surgeons often have me (quite legally) helping with retracting, suturing, holding the camera on endoscopic cases, and even drilling bone...whatever the surgeon needs, I do.
It may not be a glamorous profession, but if you've ever had surgery, a surgical technologist scrubbed in and played an integral role in your surgery. I actually get paid better than many registered nurses I know because my expertise allows surgeons in all specialties to do their cases flawlessly. So before you tell me that doing my JOB on a medical mission is a "glorified vacation," think about what I do. I didn't pay a dime to go on any of the several medical missions I attended; the surgeons I worked with wanted me there badly enough that they paid my airfare and covered my expenses. When there was no working autoclave, I figured out how to sterilize instruments, and I managed to stretch our extremely limited resources so we could perform over a hundred surgeries. For the medical students and even some surgical residents who attended, it WAS a vacation and an opportunity to learn about cases they hadn't seen before. For me, it was really hard work, trying to do my job for 14 straight hours without access to the resources we have here in the U.S. It was also extremely rewarding, and my first inclination that I wanted to become a physician so that I would have the freedom to provide healthcare to those in need. The reason I can't do it as a volunteer in this country is that any "free" surgery that is done in the U.S. is covered by charity care, but takes place in fully staffed operating rooms, and I am paid to be there.
I hope you treat surgical technologists with more respect than you treated me here when you're rotating through the OR, and especially if you choose to go into surgery. When you're getting pimped and have no idea how to answer your attending's questions, they have the capability of either helping you or making you look worse, if you treat them poorly. Same with nurses, but I think most medical students are aware of the fact that you have to (and should) treat nurses well because they know a lot more than you do.