<p>i just had my first day of physician shadowing, but i didn’t really follow the physician around.</p>
<p>he asked me to learn how to be a receptionist first and know stuff about insurance claiming and getting phone calls, then he will let me shadow him later.</p>
<p>so, i basically did the paper work for the whole day. so, is that a waste of time volunteering doing paper work, if i don’t follow the physician?</p>
<p>and is that true that med schools care about all kinds of volunteering work and it doesn’t matter whether it closely relates to physician or not?</p>
<p>thank you!!</p>
<p>The ball’s in your court: the outcome of your shadowing experience depends on your immediate actions.</p>
<p>Try to take something positive away from your experience. Running an office and dealing with insurance claims is a critical aspect of private practice. If you pay attention, you will surely learn something useful for your med school interview or future practice.</p>
<p>Paying dues by helping out in the office will be inadequate compensation for the physician who will be slowed down by having you shadow him on rounds and during patient encounters. If you act like these tasks are below you, your shadowing experience will likely be short and unrewarding.</p>
<p>It might hurt your chances. In fact, from what I understand, most top 10 medical schools favor an applicant who has performed at least a couple surgeries themselves. Nothing huge though - something like a cataract surgery, etc.</p>
<p>Cataract surgery? Come on you gotta be kidding me.
I heard you have to save 10 lives.
Than theyll consider you.</p>
<p>Airtim00, you’re somewhat correct. It really depends on how you saved them. Usually med schools favor saving people from burning buildings, but not so much from car accidents. So, if you come across a person in a car accident while someone else is trapped inside a burning building, pad your resume by stepping over the person bleeding in the road to save the person from the building.</p>
<p>WM22, that’s completely off. The person bleeding is much more medically relevant than the burning building. Obviously Harvard/Hopkins need you to have multiple varieties of life-saving (i.e. you’d better get them both), but if you’re thinking top ten – Penn, Baylor, etc. – then you should be thinking about saving the car accident victim first. Burning buildings is for the top ten in USN’s primary care ranking (getting to them before they’re too badly hurt).</p>
<p>I heard resurrecting someone is an automatic admission.</p>
<p>As long as they write you a good LOR.</p>
<p>so if i have the chance to get someone out of the way of a moving car should I or should I just let them get hit so I can revive them afterwards? What would most medical schools prefer?</p>
<p>wait that was stupid let me reword that…
What would the BEST medical schools prefer?</p>
<p>Depends on whether you’re looking for primary care (move him out of the way) or research-heavy schools (study the make of the car).</p>
<p>But what about our future MD/Phd’s out there, or our future MD/MPH’s? What would be best for them? ;)</p>
<p>well clearly you would rescue the guy from the burning car, heal him, then try and convince a few other guys to jump into burning cars and rescue them to replicate the experience and write a paper on it</p>
<p>Yes but the real challenge will be in recreating the accident exactly as it happened the first time if the subjects volunteer ahead of time. No, I think what you have to do is set up your own ‘accident car’ on the side of an intersection so you can hit unsuspecting cars from the same angle every time. You won’t know who’s getting hit and they won’t know they’re about to get hit… so it’s a double blind experiment!</p>