There are so many things that you need to include for admission to medical school that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. From your MCAT scores and transcripts to GPA, personal statements, and essays, your application covers a wide range of materials that show schools you’re serious about their healthcare programs and your future. Don’t forget to plan for the extracurricular activities that can set you apart from a pool of qualified applicants. This includes how many clinical hours for med school you’ll complete.
Completing a significant number of clinical hours for med school can show that you are serious about medical school and a future in medicine.
What Is Clinical Experience?
The goal of clinical experience is to give you exposure and a deeper understanding of the inner workings of hospitals, specializations, and patient care. This is accomplished through volunteering, shadowing, or working with any of several professionals. The important part is that you’re seeing, up close and personal, what a given area of care is like, and gaining work experience into the reality of working in health professions.
Clinical experience can be either paid or unpaid and can take many forms. You could satisfy your clinical hours for med school through volunteering. Volunteer opportunities can include hospice care or scribe work, where you’ll take notes directly from a physician as they work. Alternatively, you may choose to become a volunteer EMT, giving you exposure to the high-pressure environment of emergency medicine.
You can also take paid work that counts for your clinical experience. Working as a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) can be a great way to gain research experience and exposure to patients and understand different methods of care. Although this may require certification, you can get assistance in acquiring it through many university programs.
Further Reading
👥 The Premed’s Complete Guide to Shadowing
Why Is Clinical Experience Important?
Clinical experience serves several purposes.
- You show graduate school admissions committees that you are already committed to working in medicine.
- You’ll already have a track record of work within the medical field.
- You’ll show you have taken time outside of your academic work to get hands-on experience in the field you say you are passionate about.
This experience is also an important part of your medical education because it takes you out of the classroom and lets you see the practical application of the concepts that you’ve been learning and will learn.
Sign up to get expert tips and exclusive invites to free MCAT classes and medical school admissions workshops!
How Many Hours of Clinical Experience Do I Need for Med School?
In general, having between 100 and 150 clinical hours for med school applications is ideal. Make sure to plan ahead of time.
Sure, you could cram your 100 clinical hours into six weeks so that you can say you did them. However, a better approach is to plan between two and four hours of healthcare experience per week for at least eight to 10 months. There isn’t a required minimum number of clinical hours for med school, but this hour range is generally seen as a meaningful experience.
Finishing your clinical hours so that you can say you did them will check a box on your medical school application. However, remember that clinical experience isn’t just something that looks good on paper. Spending dedicated hours on the ground in a hospital or care facility, assisting physicians and nurses, or working as an EMT will give you valuable experience going into medical school.
You won’t learn information in a vacuum. You’ll have a tangible connection through experiences and real patients to consider when learning in the classroom. You’ll also see the different hours, stressors, and specialties in the field.
Clinical work will help strengthen your medical school application. However, it will also help you understand the direction you want to go within your own medical career.
How Do I Find Places To Get Clinical Experience?
If you’re not sure where to fulfill your clinical hours for med school, ask your university if there are sponsored programs connected to the school. If you know any physicians personally, ask to shadow them. Shadowing can be an excellent way to gain experience in a clinical setting, especially if they practice in a specialty you are considering.
You can also reach out to hospices, emergency departments, assisted living facilities, and medical centers. These places are usually open to a certain number of students seeking clinical experience hours.
What Positions Are Available To Fulfill Clinical Experience?
If you’re looking for experience within a hospital, consider looking for something like an emergency room technician, pharmacy tech, or licensed practical nurse. Nursing and nursing assistant positions may require certification or licensure.
However, clinical experience positions generally don’t include direct medical care, since volunteers and even lower-level paid positions don’t have the training to administer care. Still, they can interact with patients, and this is where the value of clinical experience comes in.
You can also consider being a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT), medical or emergency room scribe, or paramedic. It’s important to note that paramedics provide the most advanced care to emergency patients outside the hospital. So, their training is more extensive than EMTs. EMTs, on the other hand, can be volunteers and require a lower level of training. All these positions can be done with a low hourly commitment and are excellent choices for clinical experience.
Final Thoughts
Clinical experience is an important part of your medical school application that can set you apart from other applicants. It can also help guide you in the direction you want your career to go.
And while you are racking up those clinical hours, don’t forget to set some time apart for MCAT prep! Whether you need the flexibility of a Self-Paced Course, the instruction of a Live Course, or 1:1 assistance of a private MCAT tutor, Blueprint MCAT has the MCAT prep option that works for your learning style!
Get started with a free MCAT diagnostic, one free practice exam, and tons more MCAT prep resources.
