<p>Neurology, emergency room or trauma ICU?</p>
<p>I honestly have no idea if one experience would be more valuable than the other but would like advice.</p>
<p>Which appeals most to you?</p>
<p>It’s not so much which is “more valuable”, but which is more in line with your interests and which fits better into your overall story.</p>
<p>(For the record, I have 2 of 2 kids in med school. Each engaged in one of the volunteer opportunities you list, but not the same one. IOW, each of them had different interests so pursued different paths.)</p>
<p>Well, I have a bit of a split. I’m extremely interested in neuropsychology so neurology might be a good idea. </p>
<p>But I also perform really well under pressure in emergency situations (ER and ICU), and I’m very good with my hands. </p>
<p>So as you can see it is hard for me to decide. I just figured I wouldn’t have to pick between the two for many years.</p>
<p>Performing well under emergency situations----you really won’t get that kind of opportunity in either the trauma ICU or the ER. Your jobs there will be more mundane. (Think fetching magazines for patients or stocking supplies.) Because of your volunteer status, most hospitals will have pretty strict policies that limit what you can and cannot do. (And just about everything that involves actually touching patients will be off limits.) There are significant privacy and liability issues involved.</p>
<p>It’s important to remember that no matter where you volunteer, you should not be acting outside your scope of training. Doing so will only endanger the welfare of the patient.</p>
<p>I think the question is what kind of patients would you like to observe:</p>
<p>ER could be literally anything</p>
<p>Trauma ICU will be people who have very recently suffered severe injuries from some sort of accident and are probably in the first few hours to days after their surgery</p>
<p>Neurology inpatient will be people who have severe neurological disease or complications from neurological disease.</p>
<p>If I were interested in neuropsych, I would do the neurology unit as that would be the unit with the highest concentration of patients with diseases I would find most interesting.</p>
<p>“Useful for what” is the real question. If you are trying to decide if you want to go into medicine, any of them might be useful. If you think it will help you get into medical school, probably none of them will be useful. It’s not likely that you will be allowed to do anything very interesting or noteworthy. Medical schools are like top undergraduate colleges. They are looking for a strong intellectual curiosity and the ability to commit to something you believe in. Original research or great leadership skills are more likely to get you noticed. I helped start a reading program at an elementary school in a disadvantaged community as an undergraduate. That’s all my Yale interviewer wanted to discuss and that is where I went to med school.</p>
<p>One thing to consider, neurology cases are very very sad. In fact, D. who initially considered it, ruled it out after neurology rotation. Yes, you will be dealing with very sick people everywhere. But D. said that neurology cases were more sad.
She liked her psych rotation, although there are negatives there that were hard for her to accept.
Also keep in mind that volunteer will not be allowed to do much. Med. students are actually “doing” a lot, especially in non-surgical situation.</p>
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<p>That’s all in the eye of the beholder, Miami. </p>
<p>People can and do recover from neurological injuries (stroke, TBI). Struggling to recover from and/or learning to cope with a brain injury or disease can be an object lesson in the resilience of the human spirit.</p>