Extracurricular Activities

It has been over a year since I last posted. I feel old now that I no longer overlap with a single student at Boston College. I do think I have some insight to share regarding extracurriculars, as I reflect on what I did at BC and what other people did who I interviewed for medical school. I think the most important point is that medical schools want to see people who can not only handle the rigors of college, but also do things outside of class and studying.

One thing that I gave up when I started at BC was sports. Sure I loved golfing and playing hockey, but both of those involved time that I was not willing to spend, especially at the club sport level. While medical schools love people who are able to play varsity sports at the collegiate level (looking at you Duke Medical), a club or intramural sport is not going to look even as close to as good while still requiring a significant amount of your time. Instead, I invested my time in things that were both fun and rewarding.

I have touched upon BCEMS in the past, but I think that was the best opportunity to gain clinical experience while in school. Even if I wasn’t seeing patients every time I covered a soccer game or field hockey game, I was able to make friends with a large group of people who had interest in the healthcare field. I know as I became a junior and senior at BC, it became a lot more common for people to have their EMS certification and so they had to hold “skill sessions” to determine who could join the organization. Basically they were looking for competence, which you think should have been present in everyone with an EMS certification, but you would be surprised. What BCEMS gave me was not only my first health care experience where I treated patients, but it also gave me something to talk about during med school AND residency interviews. That’s right, 4 years later and I was still reliving some of the more exciting BCEMS calls I had with emergency medicine attendings, discussing how those experiences led me to emergency medicine. BCEMS required a lot of my time, and was the main group I was involved in.

This is not to say that you should only do things that look good on an application. But with medical school entrance being more competitive every year, you have to consider it. And I still found time to go to the gym 4 times a week, hang out with friends, and also take part in other fun activities like teaching classes for BC Splash, volunteering with Special Olympics, and being an RA. In fact, being an RA was certainly discussed at medical school interviews, as it showed a maturity that could not be conveyed through other activities.

Everyone also says “get a leadership position” to look good for medical school. While I agree that helps, there are plenty of ways to show commitment to an activity without a leadership position. One way is through longitudinal involvement. Even if you aren’t selected for leadership positions, having an activity you were heavily involved with for 3-4 years looks great to interviewers. I saw too many times in BCEMS people who didn’t get a leadership position and decided to put their time and effort into something else instead of continuing in EMS.

Mission trips are also something that is very prevalent at Boston College, but I do want to warn you that they are sometimes seen as “voluntorism” (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/13/the-business-of-voluntourism-do-western-do-gooders-actually-do-harm), where rich kids raise money to go for one to two weeks abroad and “help” people. Some medical schools (*cough* Loyola *cough*) love these trips, but you will run into others who look down upon them. If you are passionate about global health, you can get involved at the medical school level in a more meaningful way through research or established clinics that you continue to go to in a longitudinal manner. Who knows what the schools you apply to will think of these trips, but if you are doing them because you want to get involved in global health I encourage you to build up your app in other ways in addition to a service trip to really prove you want global health to be a part of your career as an attending physician. There are plenty of underserved communities within the United States that need volunteers, so there is truly no need to do these mission trips outside of the US. A funny story is that I had a friend at BC who was from Jamaica, and would go back home during the summers. He told me how he would see the BC students on their “mission trips” in the clubs almost every night. Personally these trips are not worth the money that you have to spend, and you would be better off volunteering in a non-medical setting with underserved communities in a longitudinal manner, and then parlaying that into involvement in global health once going to medical school (where you can often get grants to travel instead of relying on family and friends to donate).

While reading through applications of students I was going to interview, things that stood out were often hobbies. I saw plenty of “baking” hobbies, but really anything that you can talk passionately about will make the interview go much better, as they are able to see your passion through the way you talk about a hobby or activity.

Everyone who applies to medical school does shadowing, has good grades, did well on the MCAT, and 75% have some research experience (although if you’re anything like me it was just one summer of doing PCR’s to ensure that I wasn’t one of the 25% who didn’t do any research à and it remains to this day the only thing I did because it looked good on my application). What makes people stand out are their unique hobbies and activities. Boston College is no different from any other college in that it has all kinds of diverse interest groups. Find what you love to do and don’t quit on it if you don’t achieve a leadership spot. There are so many amazing people at BC that not everyone can have a leadership position. But the most important thing in my opinion is that school comes first. If your activity cuts into your grades, you should decrease the time spent with it because ultimately what gets you in the door to medical school interviews is your performance during school. GPA and MCAT are the two most important things for medical school, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.