PREMED INTERNATIONAL CLINICAL EXPERIENCE
You are a premed searching for clinical experience.
You stumble upon this:
Join us as we travel to Central America to offer health care for underserved communities. Gain valuable clinical skills while learning more about medical practice, serving some of the neediest populations, and forming lifetime memories. Guaranteed to earn 75 hours or more of clinical exposure.
Cost: $5000 (not including airfare)
Tempting, right? How simple it sounds to sign up for this “pay to play” program, get the clinical experience you need and want, while doing good?
But wait. This fictional trip is what is called voluntourism. Voluntourism, a term coined in the 90s when travelers wanted to combine vacations with community service, was hot, let’s say, 10 or more years ago. However, voluntourism has fallen out of favor with medical school admissions committees and we discourage applicants from taking part in such ventures. Why?
Paying for an expensive trip can be seen as a privileged endeavor which can convey the wrong image to medical school admissions committees. Spending a couple of weeks in a country to offer help without demonstrating any kind of long term commitment to these communities makes the experience seem gratuitous and disingenuous. Additionally, with so many vulnerable populations closer to home in the United States, admissions committees want to see your desire to learn about the issues here as well as a desire to serve domestically.
There are a few exceptions when doing global clinical work is acceptable:.
- If you have an ongoing role in a school club or organization that culminates in a mission-based trip, this can be a great opportunity. In particular, if you can bolster that interest further by showing evidence for an interest in public or global health, a clinically-based trip abroad could support your narrative. Even better is if you can maintain contact with the community you served to educate them and then maintain close contact and follow up. In writing about this experience, you can then highlight your leadership and the clinical work itself.
- If you or your parents and relatives are from a county where you visited as a child and/or witnessed healthcare inequities, traveling to that country to make an impact in some way and to learn more about those inequalities could be valuable. Again, demonstrating a longer-term commitment to that community and increasing awareness of those inequalities can also illustrate this commitment.
- If you want to pay and sign up for a trip because, well, you actually do want a vacation and this is how you enjoy spending your time off, go for it! However, you should not include this experience in your medical school application.
We know how tough it can be to find valuable clinical experiences, but don’t fall for the trap of paying for a voluntourism experience thinking this will improve your medical school candidacy. In fact, it could hurt you.
JESSICA FREEDMAN, M.D., a former medical school and residency admissions officer at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is the founder and chair of MedEdits Medical Admissions and author of three top-selling books about the medical admissions process that you can find on Amazon.
