I have a question about my firefighter trainging. I’m on my departments USAR team. (Urban Search and Rescue). I’ve been to quite a bit of specialized training such as, Swiftwater Rescue, High Angle Rescue, Confined space rescue,Structural Collapse, Ropes Rescue,Boat Rescue, And several Repelling classes. I have certificates for all this training through the University of Missouri. My question is, Will a Medical School Admission board look at these as a positive in my background? I have quite a ways to go for my undergrad, but I’d like to start preping my application.
Why would they not? I think the key thing to do is figure out how to condense these activities into one or two activities on your application. You are limited to 15 spots or so and using a spot for each certification/training is unnecessary and makes you kind of one dimensional. I would probably group your core fire-fighting activities and then group your USAR activities.
- Emergency! Said:
Why would they not? I think the key thing to do is figure out how to condense these activities into one or two activities on your application. You are limited to 15 spots or so and using a spot for each certification/training is unnecessary and makes you kind of one dimensional. I would probably group your core fire-fighting activities and then group your USAR activities.
Isn't there a separate section for other educational certificates/degrees?
You could/should not them in your narrative
They certainly demonstrate that lifelong approach to learning and they add something that will make your application stick out from others. I’d, in fact, think about talking about them in your narrative, if it relates to your motivation --wanting to be prepared to deal with any difficulty to get to and help the patient, or so forth.
Kate
I’m wanting to go into emergency medicine so Im guessing they would show that I can operate in uncertain stressful situations. Thanks everyone for your comments.
True, however, there is a common argument that you shouldn’t go into your medical school admissions/interviews with a “I’m set on this specialty mentality”. It’s certainly reasonable to say how those things impacted your desire to do medicine and how because of them, you think you probably want to do Emergency Medicine. Instead, you should say “I’m really interested in EM because I’ve had a lot of exposure to it, but I realize that there are many aspects of medicine I haven’t yet experienced that I might prefer”.
Personally, I knew before I applied to medical school that I wanted to do EM, but in interviews I always said something like the above. Med schools seem to prefer that their students have an open mind about specialties.
Thanks everyone for their input.