work experience for mature students!

[katie12]

Hi!

I know more work and volunteer experience is expected of mature students over normal applicants. How much does the usual applicant have and a competitive mature applicant have?

I plan to volunteer for a year around 4 hours a week and im worried it wont be enough (208 hours in total). Im working hard for the grades and i dont want this to hurt my application.

And when you tick the box for working with children will you have to work with toddlers? Im not really good with anyone below 7-8.

What type of work did you ask to do and what did you think was the most useful? Keeping patients company sounds the most useful for a medical applicant and things like reception work and serving drinks doesnt. i guess i dont want to tick boxes that will make the volunteer work a waste of time, what should be avoided?

[gammaknifed]

Quality not quantity! There are millions of threads on this stuff - I suggest doing a forum search

What do you mean you're not good with anyone below 7-8?! Come on, you do want to be a doctor, right?! Go and do some voluntary experience with kids below 8 for a month or two! This could actually be a good opportunity in your interviews when you're asked about your work experience. You could, for example, make the point that initially you felt that you weren't great at handling young children due to a lack of experience or a bad experience or whatever, but upon realising that to be the best doctor you can possibly be you need to be able to communicate effectively and on many levels with ALL ages of patients. You therefore sought to develop your interpersonal skills in this area and gain confidence in dealing with and building relationships with younger children etc. Plus, kids are just awesome, full of life, sponges for information and totally gullible! I can't wait to be a Dad ... I'm gonna teach my kids that a square is actually a triangle and vice versa and see what happens

Good luck and enjoy it all.

[katie12]

Ive seen a lot of topics on volunteering but none for mature students.

Yes quality is better than quantity but I want both! If the average mature student volunteers 4 times as much as I did i would be worried and would try to even it out. I saw american students saying on yahoo the average student has volunteered for 200-400 hours so im worried as a mature student that my current plan doesnt cut it!

Now as for quality! These are my options! What do you think?

I think these are the most helpful:
keeping patients company
supporting elderly
keeping adults company
keeping children company

I have no idea what these are. Anyone have any clue?:
skills(adults) (ckry, libr, rdg) meetings
skills(children) (ckry, libr, rdg) meetings
skills(psychiatric) (ckry, libr, rdg) meetings

Least helpful:
reception duties
clerical assistance
customer care
filing
guiding people
trolly service

[BeMyEnemy]

Personally, I did a one-week, full-time clinical placement in anaesthetics and joined the Red Cross first aid and emergency response teams. I've probably done about 200 hours or more voluntary work/work experience in the last 6 months. That works out to approx. 6 hours a week or so, sometimes more. If I don't get in this year (only applied to one uni!), I plan to top that up with a GP placement and I'm trying to get some health-related paid work too.

If you want something more "hands on" than serving cups of tea, I would highly recommend Red Cross. You can do first aid like I do (after training, you go to various events to provide medical support), therapeutic care (which is mostly offering "complimentary" treatment such as massage to people with chronic or terminal conditions), you can do FESS (which is working with the fire service to offer emotional and practical support to those who have been the victims of fires) and emergency response, which is what it says on the tin. You can choose to do as many or as few of these as you like once you're a member. There is a good mix of stuff to get involved in and an awesome team spirit. You also get to do cool stuff like go to music festivals (I'm doing T in the Park this summer).

[foxyamy]

I am in the lucky situation where I didn't have to think too much about it because I had luckily already been a member of St. John for about 6 years and worked as an HCA for years. But I would suggest that all those things you and others have listed would be quality BUT only on the basis that while you are doing it you try to find out as much as you can about how the NHS works. From my experience, the admissions are far more interested in finding out what you know about the NHS - i.e. whether you know what a doctor does in their day to day tasks, what about the work is hard, what is good/bad about the NHS, how members of different professions work together - than they are about how many hours you have done. What I would personally suggest is that if you are going down the volunteering path, once you are there you should try and organise some shadowing of a doctor, even if it's just for a few hours - it would be really handy for finding out exactly these things.

I would also echo the last post and say that joining Red Cross/St. John will give you some hands on experience and although it s out of the hospital environment it will put you in contact with health care professionals that may be able to help you organise some good quality experience in the hospital.

[BeMyEnemy]

Yup yup. I frequently work with doctors, nurses and paramedics on the larger duties. It also plays into experience of team work and dealing with the public etc. so it's all good.

The experience of the NHS you can get from organising work placements, which I'm pretty sure most unis expect (if you don't already work within healthcare). Idk about all Trusts, but there is an actual placement co-ordinator here whose job it is to arrange placements for medical/nursing/healthcare applicants. Otherwise you can arrange GP placements yourself through the practice manager.

[Chwirkytheappleboy]

A full year after requesting it, and 10 months after being told that I would be given it, I will FINALLY be undertaking a week long clinical work experience placement at King's. Man that was an uphill battle. But man am I looking forward to it now!

So far I've done about a year and a half with St. John Ambulance and 1 day shadowing cardiologists - which is not much. Certainly by the time I got round to applying this cycle, I had only been with SJA for a year and hadn't done anything in a hospital. Interestingly enough I surprisingly managed to get interviews with 3 out of the 4 GEP courses I applied to, but Cambridge rejected me without interview, citing my lack of work experience as the reason. I personally felt that SJA had had a massive impact on me, and on my decision to study medicine, but evidently Cambridge didn't feel that was enough. So although as most people will tell you, it's more what you get out of the experience that counts rather than how much you have, it's also worth bearing in mind that having a wide range of experience can be very important for an application. In fact, I shall quote cambridge's feedback letter:

Usually, we would prefer applicants to have some shadowing, GP and hospital based, as well as a variety of voluntary or paid work experience.

It's also worth noting that you may well need to organise shadowing/placements quite far in advance - as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the work experience placement that I'm eventually going to do at KCH will be a year after I first requested it.

[BeMyEnemy]

Man, that's crazy! I did my shadowing about 6 weeks after I first applied for it! It could have been sooner too, but I had to wait to tie up my supervisor's schedule with mine. Maybe not that many people fancy anaesthetics?

[dotvicky]

I got to do my work experience relatively quickly as well but I knew the person I was going to be shadowing personally which I think speeded things up a lot. Be aware that you'll need a CRB if you're to do work experience and that can take quite a while to get sorted.

Cheers
Vicky

[Chwirkytheappleboy]

Be aware that you'll need a CRB if you're to do work experience

I haven't been asked for one for KCH, just occupational health clearance.