How necessary are different shadowing/clinical experiences?

General Premed Discussion
1

Hi all,

I’m applying in this 2019 season and am wondering if I need to diversify my shadowing/clinical experiences. I’ve been shadowing in a large public ED the last year (about 125 hours) and an urgent care for a few months (about 25 hours) and just took a scribe job in a local ED. The ED was all that was available for scribing and I didn’t mean for both shadowing opportunities to be more EM related. I think I want to be an EM physician, but I’m worried that all my clinical experiences being somewhat similar could be detrimental on my application.

Are the small urgent care and big public ED experiences different enough or should I try to find another opportunity in a completely different specialty to round out my application?

I volunteered about 40 hours in a burn unit. Does this help at all?

Thanks!
-rb

2

Voluntary experiences help greatly because they show your spirit and will full nature toward your profession. You can put your clinical experiences into your other clinical activities portion, if you do not want to highlight them otherwise experience counts because it shows that you at-least have organizational skills.Your experience in burn department would definitely help you out in securing starting level position as EM physician but I would advise you to not be rigid on salary aspect in initial phases of your career so that you can gain valuable relevant experience.