Hey guys,
I had a question about volunteering, in terms of what experiences to put on applications. I have a decent amount hospital volunteering hours at my local hospital (~150 hrs), mostly in the ER, which was a really good experience. I wanted to spend this summer getting clinical volunteer experience in other areas of a hospital, at the hospital near my campus. Unfortunately the placement I did get was solely filing/scanning/organizing patient records, which I did about 50 hours of. The only thing I could say I got out of it was that it helped me become a little more familiar with medical terminology and procedures, and obviously more familiar with keeping patient confidentiality. However, I didn’t get to interact with patients at all, or really anyone.
I wanted to stick it out as I felt like at some point, maybe I’d be given more opportunities to interact with patients, since the volunteer coordinators mentioned that I probably would, but that never happened, and I ended up leaving after finishing up the project. I’m now focusing my efforts on the other non clinical volunteering that I enjoy more, and shadowing.
So, my main questions are, can this kind of volunteering even be put on medical school applications? Does anyone here have any volunteering experiences like this, like clerical work, that were mostly unsatisfying? How would I talk about this on an application? Can it even count as a clinical volunteering experience? It’s possible I wasted 50 hours of my time, but I’d like to think somehow I didn’t. I didn't want my volunteering this summer to be just for checking a box, but now it seems like that's what it would look like.
