Any medical school students?

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I plan to go to medical school in the UK and i've heard you don't really have a chance to get into a medical school without volunteering at a hospital first, especially as an adult.

If you've volunteered, what did you do and how did you find it?

I've heard that sometimes they give you useless things to do like selling flowers and coffee, and other times you do things like keeping children and old people company for hours (not as useless but somewhat scary). What do you think provides the most valuable experience?

And did you request extra time during exams due to slow or poor handwriting?

I hear hobbies are also important but at the moment all I have is reading, cooking, movies and video games which isn't going to make a good list I think. What kind of hobbies did you enjoy that you thought helped your application?

Welcome to WP!

Oh, you need to do more than volunteer in a hospital...and that volunteer work should include patient care as well as working in
the Emergency Room. Not handing out flowers from the gift shop.

Medical School is very competitive and the better your application, the more likely you are to receive an acceptance letter into
medical school. You need top grades in your college courses., especially your Science classes..to compete with everyone else who will also, have high grades....and a good score on the Medical Entrance Exam. Make yourself stand out among your competition. Gaining Emergency Medical Training and working on an ambulance is also, helpful. Show that you have the ability to work with people from all walks of life...old, young, rich and poor...like volunteering at a soup kitchen, nursing home, a youth center, etc.

Best of luck to you!

You can't volunteer in patient care role because of the ethical and insurance implications. I could not even get work experience in an NHS pathology laboratory because of insurance reasons.

For practical experience in dealing with medical situations try joining the St, Johns ambulance to cover public events. You could also try volunteering in a nursing home to gain experience in interacting with and caring for people.

I dont know about the UK but in the US its pretty easy to volunteer at a hospital. Just look around at local hospitals in your area. Go online see if they have a volunteer program or call them up. Lots do cause it helps the hospital save money. When you do volunteer, most of the tasks are often not too medically related for volunteer such as simple clerical duties, receptionists tasks. Find the closest thing to patent care that you can find and sign up for that.
If this exists, find a shadowing program where you can shadow doctors in different specialties. Im guessing this looks very good on your resume, but if might be hard to find such a program.

You have to make sure you do very well in your science classes and maintain a very good GPA. Med schools very competative. Dont just take the minimum pre-med requirements try to go beyond and find out which classes in your school can enhance your scores on the MCAT. While Im not pre-med I know a lot of people that are so I've gotten a lot of info about being pre-med.

Yes and no. You cannot force it. You give yourself multiple opportunities and allow it to happen. It's much more zen than we Aspies typically look at it. We want to excel, and that can end up being a two-sided sword of clunky and one-dimensional communication.

Grades and MCAT and the coin of the realm. Some of this other stuff, frankly, sounds like more lore and legend (or the fashion of the year). Do something real than resonates with you (at least something with the possibility of being real when you take that first step, getting feedback, taking that next promising step, etc, etc).

Think about a patient worried about chest pains. You have a real conversation, take a medium step forward, and at the next patient visit by this same patient, have another real conversation and another step forward. (17 years ago, my doctor told me you can never really rule out cardiovascular). It's not about guessing and "being right" (or jumping ahead and "being right"). It's feeling your way through a potentially messy process.

For example, people believe there's a lot of hype about the swine flu, and there is a lot of hype, except . . . if you get the swine flu (or any flu) and are starting to recover and then relapse with high fever, that is potentially very serious indeed. That's possibly a secondary infection of bacterial pneumonia. Well, do people know that? Generally not, and that is a specific, actionable item. And if you could get together with even one or two fellow students and do a web site where you excerpt the best news articles, the best articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, etc, you could potentially make a real difference.

Or, you could do something to help battered women (and the occasional battered man, but it is primarily a problem of male violence against women), maybe give people who are leaving violent situations more real options.

I am not a doctor. I thought about medical school in my younger years. Now, even at age 46, I find myself thinking about medical research (with occasional rounding to keep it real).

All the best to you, make decisions that are authentically yours, and decisions that are the best of both your head and your heart.

Report Finds Swine Flu Has Killed 36 Children, New York Times, Denise Grady, Sept. 3, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/healt ... u-001.html

“ . . . In children without chronic health problems, it is a warning sign if they seem to recover from the flu but then relapse with a high fever, Dr. Frieden said. The relapse may be bacterial pneumonia, which must be treated with antibiotics. . . . ”