Exploring Summer Opportunities for Pre-Med and Pre-Health

Webinar Transcription

2023-05-04 – Exploring Summer Opportunities for Pre-Med and Pre-Health

Hi everyone, and welcome to tonight’s webinar. My name is Anesha Grant. I’m a senior advisor at CollegeAdvisor and I will be your moderator today. Today’s webinar is exploring some opportunities for pre-med and pre-health. Before we get started, I’ll just orient everyone with the webinar timing. Our presenter will share some tips, resources, and guidance, and then we will open up the floor to your questions in the live Q&A.

You can download our slides under the handouts tab and you can start submitting your questions in the Q&A tab. I ask that you only submit your questions through Q&A. Direct messaging and the chat function can get a little confusing, but when you are ready, you can start submitting your questions in the Q&A tab.

But now let’s meet our presenter, Mariko. Hi Mariko. How are you? Hi, it’s great to meet you. My name is Mariko. I can go ahead and give my introduction if that works. Yeah, go for it. Thanks. Great. So, hello. Yes, as mentioned, my name is Mariko. I graduated from Yale actually twice. Once in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in the history of public health and ethnicity, race and migration.

I was a double major and. Again in 2022 with a Master’s in Public Health and Social and Behavioral Sciences. These days I primarily work on anti-drowning public health related efforts at the national and international level. Though I’ve also done a significant bit of work in healthcare disparities for communities of color.

The history of the transatlantic slave trade and pharmacy, and a number of other public and community health projects in the broader medical and public health field. Awesome. So I think you’ll have a lot of great context to share with our students, given all of those, all of your very complex background.

And so but before I hand it over to you, we’re gonna do a quick poll. So students participants, please let us know what grade level you are in. It will help give Mariko some context on how to direct our conversation today. And just to be sure that she’s giving, she’s speaking to the right audience.

And as we’re waiting, I’m just wondering, were there any programs that you participated in for the summer when you were in high school? And if so, which one kind of stands out for you? Yes, absolutely. So I did a number of different programs in high school that focused on community organizing to improve health outcomes.

But the most impactful one for me, which was also the most clinically focused, was the Osborne Head and Neck Institute Medical Scholars Program in Los Angeles. I can go ahead and drop the link to that program in the chat, but it was a, Phenomenal experience that incorporated everything from shadowing and surgical technique demonstrations to managing a caseload as a practitioner and actually publishing in the Osborne Head and Neck Institute Journal.

And so that was a huge, huge opportunity for me the summer after my junior year of high school, that really transformed my focus in public health and confirmed that I. What I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. So that’s an amazing opportunity. Thanks for sharing. And if you can drop the link in the chat, that would be great.

I’ll repost it in case folks, so just so to make sure that folks can access it. And I will go ahead and actually close our poll. And just for context for you, Mariko, the majority of folks in our space are in 11th grade, about 50%. 36% are in 10th grade, and then the remainder of folks are in ninth grade.

So we have all high school students, but mostly 11th graders joining us. This afternoon. Wonderful. Thank you for that update. All right, well, I will head off and hand it over to you, and I’ll be back a little bit later. Have a co session. Absolutely. All right, everyone, thank you so much for attending. I’m going to go ahead and try to give a comprehensive overview of how to engage in and pre-health opportunities as a high school student, if those are things you’re interested in pursuing in college and beyond.

So let’s get right into it. So in general, right, a lot of the opportunities that you will be pursuing are going to be summer opportunities because you’re not in school for the most part during the summer. So you have a little bit more time. Broadly, summer opportunities are really important in a number of different aspects of the college application process.

The first is, and this is particularly relevant to pre-med and pre-health, is that you’re able to demonstrate above and beyond commitment to both your academic and professional interests. Unlike a class that you have to take for credit, the. Summer opportunities that you pursue are things you are choosing to do of your own time and volition, and so that can do a very good job of indicating that you’re focused, that you’re serious, and that you’re inquisitive about the world around you.

Specifically in pre-med and pre-health fields. The next thing that I think is really important and useful is that you actually get real life experience and skill development. I think when it comes to pre-med and health, pre-health specifically, a lot of folks say that they’re interested in these careers because they care about helping people because they’re stable careers that make good money and because.

There is, to be frank, like a decent amount of sort of prestige or engagement with being a doctor, being in public health. And I think the concept of what it means to be a doctor or what it means to be a public health practitioner versus the reality are often two different things. And so being able to narrow down your interests and your focus and figure out, you know, is this something I know that I want to do based on what the workload looks like on a day-to-day basis?

And if so, what specific. Fields and subfields am I interested in, are hugely beneficial in helping you actually start to conceptualize what your future career is going to look like. The third thing that I would say is that these. Programs and these summer opportunities really expand your network of both mentors and peers.

Potential opportunities are everywhere, and a lot of times in professional markets, you know, you can apply for a job cold through a job application, but also, a lot of times people are recommended in or you know, a person who knows a person, and so being able to have solid mentors that can both give you advice as you plan out your career in general and also recommend specific opportunities and programs to you is an invaluable resource that I cannot overstate the importance of in this process.

Additionally, you’ll be able to meet new peers, some of whom may not go to the same school as you. That can provide you with support and friendship during this process, which I also think is a really valuable skill and resource because again, you never know where their friend, both in terms of just your social support, but you never know where those friends will end up working and who they might be looking for on the job market five or 10 years later.

And then the last thing is that in a lot of your supplemental essays and your college interviews that you’ll be doing, There will be a question or there might be a question that asks you about something you’re passionate about or something you’re interested in studying, or why did you choose the major that you chose?

And so being able to talk about these interests and topics concretely through real world experience is a huge bonus in being able to develop your full portfolio. From an application standpoint, though again, I would highly emphasize, you know, engaging in these kind of programs, not just because it’ll look good on an application, but because these are some, these are things that you’re really passionate about.

So that is generally why I’d say summer opportunities are important in the college application process, and specifically when it comes to pre-med, pre-nursing, pre-health.

Okay. So, What kinds of opportunities can you pursue if you’re interested? The first, I think most common is shadowing. You can either shadow at a public or a private practice, but shadowing involves following a practitioner around and seeing what they do, learning from them, asking questions of them, and sometimes getting to help or assist in the medical process.

I did two shadowing programs or shadowing primarily, primarily shadowing programs, one of which was the Osborne head and neck. Institute Foundation Medical Scholars program. The other was at a private practice dental institution the summer after my sophomore year, and so I did a lot of dental assistance work.

The second thing that you can do, which often will have shadowing components in it, but might be more n focused on the various manual labor and skills oriented tasks that are needed to keep a hospital running, is volunteering. And so volunteering can look. Very, very different depending on what institution you’re at.

So if you’re thinking about volunteering at a hospital, I would look really closely at what they’ll actually be having you do and seeing if the things that they’re requesting help with are things that are a good fit for you and what you’re interested in over the summer. Another thing that you can do is research.

There is a lot of research that goes into figuring out how do we take care of people, how do we improve health outcomes? And that research can be more on the clinical or STEM side. It can be more on the qualitative or non numb. Less numeric sort of public health side when it comes to evaluating or building different health programs that might exist outside of the context of clinical health.

And there are a lot of different research opportunities. Some of them are connected with specific institutions or colleges. They’ll have summer research programs. Some of them are connected with specific hospitals, the C d C, things like that. You can also look into an internship at a community health program.

So if you know that you want to go into medicine, but you’re not quite sure if clinical medicine right, or actually treating patients one-on-one is the right fit for you. There are a lot of cool community health programs that focus on things like getting people food and nutrition, educating people about healthy habits, providing medication, providing access.

To that clinical medicine. Lots of different roles there that you can look into if you’re interested in doing something at the broader and more systemic scale, which is most of what I do now. And the last thing is that there are a lot of science related extracurriculars that are pretty beneficial in developing the hard skills that you’re, you’ll need, especially if you’re pursuing clinical medicine.

So pre-health, pre-nursing. So there are a lot of different. Programs that are more science-based, but that you’ll be able to tailor towards, or that will help you in this focus on pre-med or pre-health. Okay. Feel free again to drop any questions in the chat about both why summer opportunities are important and the types of summer opportunities that you can pursue.

So when should you think about summer opportunities? Most, most ideally would be December or January of the previous year. So for summer 2023, which is this year, if you started thinking about summer opportunities in December, 2022 or January, 2023, a million gold stars to you. If not, that’s totally okay.

But definitely earlier is better because a lot of application cycle due dates are actually in February, which is a little bit early. So if you think of programs like the Yale Young Global Scholars Program, a number of the collegiately oriented programs, a lot of them have their applications due in February because they need to make decisions by April or May so that you know whether you’re in the program or not.

There are also a number of internship dates that are open in April and in May, so that is another option. So really, right now is a good time to start pinning down what you’re actually going to be doing with the next few months of your life. Bear in mind that earlier is always better because paperwork processing.

Bureaucracy always takes longer than we’d like or than we’d expect. So especially if you’re going to do an independent shadowing opportunity, the sooner you can reach out to doctors and practitioners, the better it’ll be for you both in terms of what you are going to be able to do this summer, and also the onboarding process, the speed and the ease of onboarding, plus doctor availability.

There are tons of places where you can find summer opportunities. We are at CollegeAdvisor and so of course the first place that I have to plug and with good reason because I’ve submitted a lot of opportunities to this portal is the CollegeAdvisor Extracurricular Opportunities summer portal. And so, The portal offers extracurricular opportunities year-round, but you can narrow down your search to summer if you’re looking for specific kinds of opportunities.

That portal is an excellent resource. You can also do your own independent online searching. I think this works especially well for private practices if you’re contacting a healthcare practitioner, whether it’s family practice or dentistry or Optometry where it’s like a singular person who’s running a smaller practice that maybe has four or five or 10 employees.

That’s actually often a really easy way to shadow. There’s lot, there’s often less bureaucracy involved in trying to get a shadowing opportunity from. These private practices and the easiest way to find them is honestly to just do an online search. And you can also ask family, friends, and personal network.

You never know who might have an opportunity your way. So the more that you can talk to folks and let them know that this is what I’m interested in and this is what I’m trying to do this summer, the more potential opportunities. That can come through your personal pipeline. For context too, the Osborne had a neck foundation program.

Actually, I first found out about it because one of our neighbors is a doctor at the practice. And so granted, I want to also acknowledge that any kind of personal networking is rooted in certain kinds of systemic privilege. But always, always ask around. You never know who you might be able to find through your personal networks.

College list and college board also have some pretty solid databases that go through different summer opportunities for folks. So you can definitely check out the big institutions as well if you’re interested in finding specific opportunities. Okay. So once you found your opportunity, what will you need to ensure that you get to take advantage of it?

I would say that the three things that are going to be most important, the first is your resume. Again, right? A lot of these positions are skills-based positions. They’re gonna be asking you. To do stuff. And so being able to clearly articulate your work experience, your academic experiences and your skills will help people find the best match for you as soon as possible.

And so having a developed resume is really important and make things a lot easier in the college application process. CollegeAdvisor Advisors can help you develop your resume and provide you with both feedback, resources, and templates for doing so. So if you are currently enrolled in CollegeAdvisor and you don’t have a resume yet, I would recommend asking your primary advisor if you can make one for this summer.

If you’re not enrolled in CollegeAdvisor and you are interested, there will be more information later in the webinar to talk through what that might look like and how you can jump on board. So, One resume, please do have one. The second thing that is very useful is having either a cover letter or just a clear summary of your goals and interests.

So if you reach out to someone and you are trying to secure shadowing opportunity, for example, you can say, hi, my name is Mariko. I am a rising senior in high school. I am really interested in. Dermatology, right? And here are the goals and interests and things that I would like out of a summer opportunity shadowing for your practice.

So think of it almost like an elevator pitch, right? If someone asks, what do you want to do this summer? And why you should be able to regurgitate a clear, articulate, and nuanced answer about specifically what you want out of this. And again, a lot of that specificity will help to reduce that overall.

Pre-med. I just want to be pre-med, and I’m just saying that I want to be pre-med kind of energy that pervades this particular field. The last thing is that individual programs that are established and with infrastructure often have their own applications, so expect essays expect. Forms and questions that you’ll need to fill out.

And they’ll probably ask again, right? Why do you want to do this kind of work? What are you interested in? And what’s your time commitment like? So make sure that you have all of that information ready to go. And if you create, write this sort of cover letter, letter, document, then often that will translate well into being able to answer essay questions on formal applications.

Okay? Onwards we go. Okay. So we’ll have, we’ll have another quick poll just to give Mariko a minute to take a sip of water. And so yeah, if you could let us know where you are in the application process. Have you started, are you researching schools? Are you working on essays? Are you getting application materials together?

We actually had a couple students who were almost done, even though they’re in their junior year. So let us know where you are in the process as we just take a quick little break. And as we’re waiting, we’ve had a few questions. Mari, go around the. Around volunteering. So I’m wondering, in addition to your time at Osborne, were there any volunteer opportunities that you took advantage of and if any of those stand out for you?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think volunteering is a really wonderful way to get real world experience and engage with potential communities or potential. Workplaces that you might be interested in. Most of my volunteering in high school was less in the clinical medicine field and more in general community organizing and events.

So examples of volunteer engagement that I participated in in high school included working with Asians from MI Miracle Marrow Matches, which focuses on providing bone marrow donations to those who. Need donations mostly for cancer related reasons, and since bone marrow matches are often. The, the thing that’s most important is sort of shared race ethnicity.

It can be really difficult to find marrow matches for folks from different marginalized communities, and so this particular organization works on providing and cultivating a larger database of. Asian identifying donors. And so we made, and so as part of a sort of community service volunteer project for that organization, we worked to develop educational materials.

Materials, so flyers and pamphlets. This was also like pre-everything being on the internet for them to be able to hand out at different events that explained their mission a little bit more clearly and gave people easy access to. The donation procedure. So those were the kinds of projects that I worked on in high school from a volunteer standpoint.

That’s really fascinating. I appreciate you sharing something that’s out of the context of direct work or volunteering, being like a candy striper or things like that so that students can show they can still demonstrate that interest in pre-medicine and health, but in these kind of different community centered and organizing ways.

That’s a really cool example. Thank you for sharing. All right, we’ll go ahead and close our poll. And the majority of folks, which makes sense, are in the researching stage about 79% 60% have it started. And for those of you in the ninth grade, that’s totally okay. That is understandable. And even for those of you in the 10th grade, that is fine as well.

And then about 5% are working on essays, but the majority of folks are in the researching phase. And so I think hoping to use some opportunities to give some context to that. Thanks for that answer and thanks for you all for responding to the poll. I’ll hop back off and hand it back over to you, Mariko.

Wonderful. Yes. Thank you so much for your participation. Definitely. When you’re researching schools, considering what kinds of programs might be useful or interesting to you from a pre-med career standpoint is definitely an important part of that process. So would highly encourage looking at that critically as you go through your.

School list development. Okay, so I think a question that I’ve already seen in the Q&A effectively, right, is are summer opportunity, are some summer opportunities better than others, or what specifically is going to make me stand out? How do I optimize this very limited window of the summer to make my college application as strong as possible?

And so my answer is that, you know, Deciding what’s better or not better is a really difficult metric. There’s no thing in any college application process beyond, I guess having proper grammar and not saying anything crazy, right? That is better or not as good. What’s it? It is very individually dependent and very holistically, right?

Factored into your entire application. But what I will say is that some opportunities will stand out more than others, and I think that’s particularly crucial in competitive fields like pre-med, pre-health, where a lot of people want to or think they want to be doctors also. I may add that at any point in this process you decide you don’t wanna be a doctor.

That’s totally okay. But back to things standing out, right? I think that the first thing that will differentiate your summer opportunities for other summer, from other summer opportunities is going to be your level of responsibility and ability to actually explore the ins and outs of whatever career opportunity you’re focused on.

Right. If you are volunteering as a candy striper, as bedside assistance, or as someone who’s stocking medication or cleaning up right in a hospital setting, that is awesome, especially if that is a life-changing or really rejuvenating or important experience for you. What will make you stand out? Is going to be taking it a step beyond that and creating or building or being in charge of.

Certain kinds of programming, right? Are you managing a team of student volunteers or are you just a student volunteer that follows someone else? Right, and that’s the case, I would say, for all extracurricular activities. But because so many hospitals have shadowing programs, unless you’re putting in a lot of hours per week and a lot of time it can be difficult to differentiate application to application.

If everyone has sort of done like, oh, I shadowed for two months, I shadowed for two months, I shadowed for two months. Again, you know, one of the things that made the program that I did particularly unique was the ability to not just shadow, but to. Publish. So we publish our own research and also to learn some of the hard skills through clinics and through applied practical sessions.

So being able to perform skills as well as shadowing doctors makes it a little bit more of a competitive program. Also, bear in mind if you’re doing a program, some programs are more selective than others, and so of course we wanna think about that too. However, the bottom line is that the most important aspect of any opportunity is its impact on you and your ability to talk.

Write and articulate that impact. So let’s break that down cuz those are two things. The first is what’s the impact, right? If you’re doing something and you’re putting a lot of hours into shadowing or to volunteering, and it does not make you happy, it does not make you fulfilled. You’re not necessarily learning new or exciting things.

It’s gonna be very difficult to write about that on your college applications. And also to just generally talk about that opportunity as something that’s valuable to you. However, if you do something that impacts you deeply, even if it isn’t the most right, clinically oriented, pre-med, pre-health opportunity, I.

That will stand out a lot more because you’ll be talking about it genuinely. Right? And for you as a person outside of just your college applications, it’ll impact you for years to come. And one good example I had with one of my seniors in the last application cycle was she was very interested in pre-med, pre-health, but her most impactful opportunity wasn’t shadowing, it was actually working at an elderly assisted care home, right?

And so, of course, in that, Role, she was going to learn certain things that would be really beneficial to her in her pre-med, pre-health career. But her interaction with individual residents and her ability to learn from folks who had, you know, lived for a really long time and had a lot of wisdom to develop patience, to develop empathy, to really care for people, that’s what made that opportunity stand out for her and it produced itself.

As a remarkable common app essay. And so that’s the second part, right, is if it impacts you, amazing. Wonderful. That’s exactly what we’re looking for. Then you have to be able to convey that impact to others in your application process, right? So how are you talking about and articulating the opportunities that have been presented to you is just as important as the impact that they have.

Because if you can’t, to a college admissions officer, to a college interviewer, to a letter of rec writer, Why this opportunity was so important, it’ll be very difficult to stand out or to distinguish yourself within the application process. So really thinking about the ability to self-reflect on what’s important and why it’s important is crucial in that, and to have a very clearly personal take on it where I could not copy paste your thoughts on your summer opportunity and ascribe them to someone else’s summer application.

And so for me personally, right? Actually, when I was interning with Osborne Head and Neck, the most impactful portion of that internship to me was actually how poorly I did in certain aspects of it. I knew even going into that, that I wasn’t necessarily interested. That in doing primarily clinical health and medicine work as a long-term career.

That confirmed it. But that meant that some of the more clinical aspects of the program, such as surgery, observation were difficult for me. They weren’t in my wheelhouse. I had to study. I couldn’t just walk in and know all of the answers. Right. And so one of the things I did in my college application process was I wrote about that.

I wrote that, you know, My classes at school were interesting and I knew exactly what I needed to do to perform well on them, but in this sort of new real world environment, there were things that I struggled with or things that I failed at and that I was really grateful for the opportunity to be able to experience that in real time.

Right. So again, the take or the. The viewpoint that you’re using to talk about these different opportunities on your college admissions PA in your college admissions packet can be really vast and really broad. And so again, I would very much encourage, right, when we talk about better opportunities, the ones that impact you the most and the ones that allow you to build and create things rather than just follow along.

So, That is sort of my spiel on that. If you have any questions about specifics, I’m happy to answer them. Okay. And so when it comes time to your college application, there are a couple of different ways, and some of which we’ve talked about that you can showcase your summer activities. So on the common application, which is most private, in some public schools, there’s space for up to 10 extracurriculars.

You’ll get a certain number of characters to describe exactly what you did and how you did it. And you know, what was. Involved in your extracurricular opportunity. If you’re applying to the University of California system, you actually get 20 total extracurriculars and awards. So normally on any application, you’ll have the opportunity to showcase what you’ve done over the summer.

You will also get the opportunity to upload the same resume that we talked about earlier into your application. And so having, again, a good resume is super important because it allow you to go into a little more depth than the common application extracurricular section. Because there isn’t a word limit or a character limit on your resume, you’ll also be allowed to.

Specify what kinds of skills and what kinds of outcomes that you have that are associated with your summer opportunities. The third place right is a personal essay I just mentioned one of my former advisees who talked about their experience in sort of pre-med, pre-health opportunities as a full common app essay.

There are also various supplemental opportunities to talk about these kinds of summer or extracurricular engagements. So definitely lots and lots of places where you can write about. The different things you’ve experienced if you are taking an academic course. So whether it your school offers some specific courses that are more applied science, pre-med, pre-health courses some schools even offer a community health worker certification, which is super cool.

Or you’re maybe taking an extra course at a community college or at a four year college nearby, which I would also recommend doing. If you have the time in your schedule and you want to narrow down into some of the specifics of pre-med, pre-health, you can also include those on your coursework or sort of academic section.

And the last thing to always keep in mind when we talk about any activities on our college application is the quality versus the quantity of the number and the depth of your extracurricular activities. Activities. There’s always a balance. There are some people who do not do as many extracurricular activities, but it’s because they’re really intensely and deeply involved in the three or four things that they do.

And there are some people who do a lot of things but maybe aren’t as involved in. Every single opportunity that’s on their list. I think again, the most important thing in balancing these two things is being able to talk about personal impact and your sort of leadership and building creativity building.

Community solutions engaging with the world around you, right? Those kinds of opportunities should go first and should be highlighted the most. So that would be my biggest suggestion there, and trying to balance those things. And again, right? Don’t put tons and tons of hours into an opportunity that is not bringing you anything, right?

Seeking out and being brave enough to seek out new opportunities is. An important part of taking ownership over your early professional and college application journey. Okay. So in terms of how to actually find those opportunities, right? What are some successes, what are some tips for success here? The first is get an early start, right?

As discussed in the previous slide, some of the application cycles are pretty early, and even if. They aren’t right. Your program or your opportunity, you don’t need to have solidified until April or May. It’s great to know what you’re doing for the summer in as far in advance as possible, because then you can plan other aspects of your life around it, right?

You know, if your family goes on vacation or if you want to take an extra community college course, right? Knowing what your commitments are is going to be crucial in that kind of scheduling. The second thing is right, your specificity, being able to narrow in on what you specifically are interested in, or if you don’t know, and it’s totally okay if you don’t know where to start.

Figuring out a solid program or opportunity that’ll help you narrow down those areas and aspects of the sort of pre-med and pre-health field. So a really good example for me in early college was that I knew. Going into college that I wanted to focus on racial disparities in healthcare access and treatment, and that was my sentence.

I just kept saying it over and over again. But what did that actually look like in terms of operationalizing this goal into a job? I couldn’t tell you because I was 17, and that’s okay. That’s totally okay. But what I knew I did need to do was figure out how I could start to learn about. The different opportunities that I could have to achieve this particular goal.

And so I chose internships that would allow me to work with multiple community organizations and multiple. Institutions such as departments of health, right? To be able to get my foot in the door and say, okay, so these people focus on evaluation. These people focus on program or caseload management.

These folks focus on obtaining research grants, right? Whatever that is. And so being able to meet with everyone here are the sort of pros, cons, ins and outs of their job. Figure out what I was good at and what I didn’t like as much, and narrow things down from there. And so also, again, I am a big public health person, so I will encourage you too to look for public health and pre-health opportunities as well as just clinical medicine or shadowing.

You can do so much cool work in your community to improve people’s health through avenues that go beyond just person to person or patient to practitioner relationships. Clinical medicine is incredibly important, and if you know you want to be a doctor and that’s what you want to do, absolutely go for it.

But there are so many cool ways to get involved in your community that. Extend beyond that and focus on sort of systems infrastructure. And again, it’s how you’re able to talk about these opportunities that matter, right? So that is, that is my pitch for public health related things. And then the last thing I would recommend is reaching out and learning from others across medical and health fields, right?

Even if you’re not going to secure an entire internship with a doctor or a nurse, or. A dentist or an optometrist, what you can do is ask if you can get 30 minutes of their time over Zoom or in person to just ask them about their experience. Right. Figure out some questions that would be useful for you about, you know, what was it like when you were applying for undergrad?

What was it like? Getting into middle school school, what tips would you have for someone in high school? Ask those kinds of questions because getting people’s real life input on the career that you might be interested in is absolutely invaluable and will teach you a lot of things that you will not hear in the non sort of personalized application and decision making process.

Okay, I have reached the end of our prepared slides, so I am very excited to now answer some questions from all of you. Before we get started I just wanna let folks know that you can be able, you can download the slides again under the handouts tab. The way that our Q&A will work is that you all can submit whatever questions you have, the Q&A tab.

I will read them aloud so that Mariko can have a chance to answer them and then paste them in the public chat. If you’re having any challenges with submitting questions in the Q&A. You might have to log out and make sure you are logging in through the webinar link you received via email. One question that I have for you, Mariko, as we are waiting for some questions to come in that was submitted during registration was one student I guess asked what are things that they can start to do now in order to increase their skills around you know, medical, healthcare type things.

And then what are skills and experiences that they need now in order to be competitive for some of these summer programs? Okay. Awesome question. So I would say in terms of skills, experiences, it is gonna depend a little bit on what you’re trying to do in the medical field. So I think that, you know, there isn’t one universal answer, but I would say that on the.

Soft skills side, it’s going to be things like being an adaptable learner, being able to keep up, being able to be quick on your feet, right? Being able to absorb information quickly and execute new procedures. Flawlessly or close to flaw flawlessly because you have to, because it’s health, right? And so being able to develop that kind of critical thinking skill in through a number of different avenues is going to be really important.

Not every program is going to expect you to have hard skills, right? You are only in high school, and that’s okay. Right? So being able to demonstrate, you know, I’m a fast learner. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. I’m easy to work with, right? I take direction. Well, all of those kinds of things will help you a lot.

And then being able to say that about yourself, these are the things I know about myself. I’m inquisitive, I’m this, I’m that can help a lot in starting to outline the the process that you’re sort of moving through as a potential. Program participant. The other thing on the hard skill side is I would say that there are certain courses that you can take if you want to.

Much of them are on, many of them are online. If you just wanna knock out some easy Primary surface level skills, things like First Aid and CPR R certification via the Red Cross. I do a lot with aquatics and anti drowning, so things like your water safety instructor license, right? Community health worker license.

There are definitely a number of programs that you can go through to earn some basic credentials in terms of hard skills that can make you a little bit more competitive, but, The main thing is I would assess where you’re at honestly, and see which programs will help you best achieve the skills that you would like to have in the future.

Right? If you know, I would like to be able to walk into college with this, this, this, and this, as someone who’s interested in being a nurse, find the program that will be able to do that to the best of your ability. Building off of that last part of what you just shared, what would you say for someone who’s kind of uncertain about these programs, what would you say are some of the key benefits and skills that you think students will, will walk out with?

So yeah, absolutely. I think that the biggest one is real life understanding experience. There is no. With the exception of like high schools that have specialized classes, when you look at your sort of basic high school curriculum, math, science, English, et cetera, right? There is no class that will show you what it’s really like to be in the field as a medical or public health professional.

There will be no class that, you know, there’s no AP class. In AP pre-med, right? And so being able to actually physically or virtually be in the environment and see what the day-to-day workflow and rhythm looks like, what you’re actually being called upon to do on an everyday basis, and the skills that are associated with that is going to be the most helpful thing by far in the extracurricular process, is really, truly understanding what it means to do the thing that you say that you want to do.

That’s great. There’s a question that came in that’s a little bit more geographically specific. So the student asked what sort of summer programs would be available to more rural students who might not have access to the more standard ones. Absolutely. So this is where I think right, COVID 19 has done a lot of things has, has done a lot of unfortunate things to our society at large.

But one of the things that has been really good is that there are a lot more tele-health. Opportunities for potential career development. And so tele-health opportunities will allow you to do a virtual internship or a tele-health internship with different folks either locally or around the world. I would also recommend looking at programs that specialize in rural medicine and rural healthcare delivery because if you can get involved with one of those that will be particularly applicable, right to your.

Geographic setting. I’ll drop this in the chat, but I know one. Of these programs is the tele squad, the tele-health squads program. And that matches with folks, that matches folks with different sites around the world actually. And so this is a program that one of my advisees from the last cycle did and really enjoyed.

She worked with a clinic in South America in patient administration and onboarding much of which she was able to do online as a bilingual. Student. She also really enjoyed the opportunity to engage with her Spanish, but you don’t have to be bilingual to do it. So I’ll drop that in. I’m not sure what their application cycle is for this year, but definitely worth taking a look at them and some of the other tele-health internships available.

And I wonder if that would also be being rule, if that’s an opportunity to go back to a suggestion you gave earlier around community organizing. Maybe if you’re not able to have more hands-on health experiences, and maybe that’s an opportunity to talk about. Community organizing for your community of how to have greater access or minimize minimize the distance for healthcare resources in your community as well, depending on what’s available.

So again, trying to think a little bit outside the box. Absolutely. One other question that I wanted to raise to you, or what are some tips for making the most out of shadowing opportunities, which I think folks feel are a little bit more passive and less direct skills development? Ask a ton of questions.

Ask a ton of questions and also self-advocate, right? All they can say is no. So if you’re sort of doing a more passive shadowing opportunity and you say, Hey, based on what I’ve seen over the past few weeks, I’m really interested in being able to do this. Would it be possible if I helped you out with.

This, right. Whatever that is. Obviously within the realm of reason, you’re not performing surgery or anything, but figuring out how to self-advocate and make that opportunity less passive and more active is going to be important. Even if it’s you suggesting, right, you know, Hey, I’ve seen the social media for this place.

Can I develop some educational content for you? Right? Everyone loves it when young people do social media or digital media related things but also in the patient interaction and and in everyday administrative tasks. Ask, ask for questions and self-advocate. One question that came in through the Q&A was, do you have any recommendations on volunteering or part-time jobs for 15 year olds?

So folks who are minors where patient interaction might be available. Absolutely. So I would say again, right, it’s going to be established shadowing and volunteering programs at major hospitals. You can certainly search the ones in your area to see if they have anything set up. For private practices, a lot of times you just have to cold call.

You just have to email and call, like literally physically call and say hi. This is who I am. This is what I’m interested in doing, and they’ll take you on as a minor. As long as you are not getting compensated for your time, you don’t need a work permit. If you are getting compensated for your time, then you can sort of work that out with the private practice.

Again, often less bureaucracy involved with the private practice, but my biggest suggestion is I saw that that question was asked by a parent is, have your child do the work. As much as possible. So if someone is going to be calling that private practice and asking for a job or a volunteering opportunity, the person who should be calling is your child, not you.

Because they’re the ones that are actually interacting with the doctors. It’ll demonstrate more engagement and more proactive determination to learn. And it’s a really important skillset as your child goes forward and starts to develop independence in managing their own career or their pre-care opportunities.

So that would be my suggestion. You can definitely help them as much as possible, but make sure they’re the one who’s actually making the call. Yeah, I think self-advocacy is a good thing to reinforce for the students, especially in this, in the pre-med process. I’m gonna take a quick p s a. So for those of you in the room who aren’t already working with us, just know that there are a lot of admissions experts available through CollegeAdvisor like myself and Mariko who are ready to help you and your family navigate through the process and one-on-one advising sessions you can take the next.

Step by signing up for a free 45 to 60 minute session using the QR code that is on the screen. During that conversation, we’ll talk about extracurriculars application strategy, discuss your college list and outline any additional tools that you’ll need to stand out in the competitive admissions world.

So again, for any folks not working with us, feel free to take advantage of that QR code in order to sign up for a free session and connect with CollegeAdvisor moving forward with the questions. One kind of, I guess specific to where, where folks are. So someone asked what courses are good for a 10th grade student looking for a medical career.

And then there were also like, what are different college majors to pursue in order to be a pediatrician? So any guidance that you have around classes or majors that students should be thinking about if they wanna pursue the pre-med path pathway, the long term. Absolutely. So let’s take it with classes first.

I think having a very firm grasp of all your basic science is going to be important. So whatever the highest level classes are for biology, chemistry, math, physics. All of those are just sort of checklist items of you’re gonna have to take those courses in the pre-med cycle anyway. So making sure you have a very firm grounding of that in high school is going to be important.

I think that if your school has some sort of social impact or again, sort of community organizing elective, then you can tailor that course towards being in health. So I would suggest that too. And also look into, I’m a big advocate of taking community college courses because I think they make your application pop, and also you’ll get the opportunity to really see what this will look like in the next phase of your life.

So I would recommend looking into any of the elective courses at the community college level that pre-meds might take. Right? So whether it’s, you know, The history of public health in America or the right, some sort of like medicine specific elective. That is an intro of course that might be of interest to you.

When it comes to majors, it’s definitely gonna be school specific, so I would recommend reading up on every school’s pre-med programming to understand what is the best fit for you. Some schools have a pre-med major, right? If you’re going to be a doctor, this is your major. But a lot of schools don’t. And so identifying which major makes the most sense for you is going to be an important part of that process.

I’ll give the example of Yale, which is where I went. There is no pre-med major, but there are 13 courses that you’re required to take in order to apply to medical school upon graduating from Yale. And again, a lot of those are science-based courses. So for a lot of pre-med majors, it’s much easier for them to major in a science like biology or chemistry because then you’re not overlapping or double dipping, or you are double dipping and overlapping with both your pre-med courses and your major courses because a lot of the courses you’ll be required to take for your major or pre-med courses as well.

However, there are a lot of fantastic and remarkable individuals that I know who took a more humanities or soft science major and simply took the pre-med requirement courses as well, and. For those folks, they tended to have a more clear vision of why or for what reason they were majoring in that soft science or humanities.

And again, a lot of those folks were more systemically based. Folks that were interested in psy sociology or psychology in neuroscience and neurosurgery, and folks that were more interested in his. Jury of public health specific stuff. So definitely take a look at each school and figure out what makes the most sense for you based on your workload and what you’re ultimately trying to accomplish in the medical field.

I know you spoke about resumes and activity lists earlier, but gonna re-ask the question just in case there’s some pieces you can add, but do you have any quick tips for writing an effective resume when applying for these types of programs and the skills that someone should highlight in that resume?

Absolutely. I think. Highlighting any previous work or volunteer opportunities and specifically what kinds of responsibilities you were given in those opportunities is really helpful. So there’s a better sense of what kind of. Environments have you been in before and what are you able to execute? And so because even if the work opportunity is not directly related to medicine, like say you’re working at a restaurant or a fast, fast food establishment, being able to list certain skills about inventorying or managing large numbers of customers, right?

Those things are still applicable within a healthcare setting. So making sure that is foregrounded and then also making sure that. Your resume is easily readable and easily digestible for someone who is skimming it and not reading it word for word or sentence for sentence. So making sure you’re choosing words that pop and that are specific so that it’s an easy reading experience for whoever is going to be reading it.

Do you know about any scholarships or financial aid that might be available to help folks participate in summer programs? Absolutely. So a lot of programs are equipped with their own financial aid or scholarship opportunities, so definitely prioritize programs where they will pay for you to do things, or you’ll end up with a zero net cost because you are maybe buying in, but you’re also getting compensated for your work.

I would also just suggest asking if there is no information, I do know that some programs. The way that they, they, they are for-profit enterprises, so the way that they make money is to charge you for admission. And so if that’s not something that’s doable for you, I would just recommend steering away from those programs.

That is what I did. And building your own opportunities instead. And I know building your own stuff can be a little bit scary, but it often ends up being a more sustainable opportunity for you and will make you stand out. You can also work in sort of right. Actively going door to door and asking for donations, fundraising for yourself.

Often local businesses are interested and willing to sponsor students as they go on these different paths, as long as you can offer them some sort of publicity or engagement in return. So there are a lot of different ways that you can go about financing things. Yeah, I, I’ve had students do similar projects where they will, you know, publicize promote on Instagram or share flyers and things like that, and combining their bus, combining the sponsoring business with their experience as well.

Mm-hmm. Can another question for you is, can I participate in pre-med or healthcare summer programs if I haven’t taken any related courses in high school yet? Absolutely. I mean, again, I think, you know, taking your, your required sciences is important, but. If you’re only in ninth grade, for example, there’s only so much science that you could have taken in high school cuz you’ve only been there for one year.

So definitely feel free to put yourself out there. I think, you know, make sure that if you’re coming into it, be able to identify the, strengthen your skillset. That might make up for some of the lack of technical training, but in all honesty, the amount that you learn in AP Biology, that’s. Directly applicable to your shadowing experiences.

It’s not that high. So I think that some of it is just demonstrating interest, an easy way to do, to demonstrate interest as classes. But as long as you can put together a coherent portfolio for yourself that explains why you focused on the things you focused on, you’ll still have a pretty good shot.

And I think we, a lot of the perspective has been trying to help students make themselves good candidates, but what advice would you give to students on how to evaluate whether or not these programs would be a good fit for them regarding their interests and their goals? Absolutely. So I think really sitting down and getting to the root of why do I want to do this?

And how do I want to do this? And really sitting down with yourself and self-reflecting is an important part of this process. Like really, excuse me. Bless you. Slowing down and saying, you know, what about medicine is it that makes me want to get up in the morning? Right? Is something that we need to constantly ask ourselves.

Regardless of where we are in our career, it can be really easy to sort of get sidetracked by a number of different things, whether it’s college application, competitiveness, or later your 401k, whatever that is. Right? And so really getting back to the root. Or the heart of why you’re doing what you’re doing is super important and allowing yourself to make smart and well-rounded, but also instinctual decisions from there about what you’re going to pursue and what’s actually going to fulfill you.

I think that. As you move through this process, those original goals or aspirations also might change. So it’s important to check in with yourself and see that you know, Hey, is the thing that I said I wanted to do a year ago or two years ago, is that still what I want to do? And if not, do I want to stay on this path or do I want to go towards a different one?

And. Whatever your conclusion is, it will be okay. It will be fine. You do not have to have everything figured out immediately, and even if you decide to really continue with the pre-med path all the way through, you got another eight years or so, so you will continue right, to develop and grow on your journey.

I really like this next question because I honestly had some students who started doing shadowing it with dentists even though they wanted to be medical doctors because that was the access that they had. But this student is asking, Could more animal oriented activities such as shadowing or shadowing a veterinarian or volunteering at a shelter still work as a pre-med program?

Totally. Again, I think it’s gonna be about how you talk about your experiences, right? So if you can make some very clear connections between, yeah, this was an animal, but I learned this, this, this, this, this, this skill, right? Or this, this, this, this thing that’s going to help me as a potential human practitioner.

Right? That’s totally, I. A very viable opportunity. And who knows? Maybe you’ll discover that you really want to be a vet instead. Right? So I would still encourage pursuing those opportunities, especially if you love animals, right? If the thing that is gonna make you happy is right. Doing a shadowing or a volunteer experience, totally do that.

And remember also that you can tap into the networks. At your shelter or at your veterinary practice to ask about further opportunities because again, people know people. So if you’re like at a shelter and you’re saying, you know, this is where eventually I’d like to be in terms of shadowing, then you can totally do that and go from there.

Do you have any tips on how to network and maintain contact after these opportunities in order to make sure that they can continue to leverage and actually just build a professional network in the field? Wonderful question. So the first is never doubt the power of a thank you email. Always, always email if you do an informational interview.

If you’re, if you do or pitch something and the person does not select, you still email and say, thank you for the opportunity. Would love to stay in touch, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Emailing people. Great way to stay in touch with them. I would also say for folks that have become regular mentors or who you’d like to stay in contact with, the most helpful thing for me is actually to just set a Google calendar or whatever calendar system you use, like an invite or an E or a bump reminder, like three months in advance to just say, Hey, check in with Dr.

So-and-so, or Check in with this person, and when you check in with them, right, it can be a very chill communication. Right. You can just email them and say, hi, this is Mariko from the Summer Internship Program. I just wanted to see, you know, how your fall is going. I just wanted to let you know that this year I’m involved in these courses and these extracurricular activities.

I really appreciated how X, Y, and Z from this summer has helped me do X, Y, and Z throughout the fall. And I’d just like to thank you for that. And you know, and then if you want to talk to them about something specific, you can ask to set up a meeting. All right, those are all of our questions and some bonus questions that we had thrown in there.

So we will say that that is the end of the webinar. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you so much Mariko, for your thoughtfulness and your diverse experience and sharing. We hope that you gained some tips and strategies for creating an extracurricular profile as a candidate for applying for pre-med and pre-health majors.

We also hope that you’ll join us for our other webinars later this month on May 9th, we have a session on building. Passion project, which is another way that you can independently develop some experiences and skills, followed by a session on building your personal brand on May 10th. And we’ll also give some tips on making the most of college visits on May 11th and share some updates regarding standardized testing trends on May 16th.

So definitely hope to see y’all in the future. Until next time, take care and have a great evening, and thanks again Mariko for your time. Thank you. Bye.