Why you should volunteer
The journey to medical school can be quite challenging. Students must have a clear vision of wanting to enter medical school and must prepare accordingly during their undergraduate years. While the pillars of medical school admission remain excellent grades with strong standardized testing scores and other scholarly activities, an often unlooked pillar is a volunteering experience.
Volunteering experience is crucial in helping students decide if medicine is a right fit for them. Volunteering experiences allow pre-health students, who would otherwise not have any patient contact, to see not only physician-patient interaction but also experience various medical systems and clinic systems at work.
Many large universities have associated academic medical centers with large volunteering offices. However, smaller community hospitals are not affiliated with universities and also many universities do not have affiliated hospitals or academic medical centers.
Students entering medicine, without any family members who work in healthcare, may feel bewildered at the array of extracurricular activities required to be a competitive applicant. While discussing volunteering, it remains a nebulous entity for many.
Most university students are not at universities that are affiliated with large academic health centers and may not really know where to go to find volunteering experiences.
Also, many smaller community hospitals, which represent a large fraction of hospital care in the United States may not have robust volunteering offices developed.
We decided to collaborate with Dr. Sarkissian, to help build a website, to help serve the 20 million people in Southern California, where tens of thousands of students, spread across dozens of colleges and universities, are actively pursuing a career in medicine. To help minimize the stress and confusion associated with obtaining proper volunteer experiences, we decided to build a website, dedicated to organizing the information to make it more readily available.