From medical and law schools to highly coveted graduate programs, volunteer experience is a must – but at what cost?
Picture this: You are a highly driven and passionate student, aspiring to become a surgeon. Balancing work and full-time studies to support yourself and your family, you have very little time outside of your commitments. However, your unwavering dedication to school and work has earned you glowing references, excellent grades, and a diverse skill set. You are on the cusp of making your dreams come true, but there’s one problem – you don’t have the hundreds of hours of volunteer experience recommended to apply to MD programs in the country.
For many undergraduate students, this dilemma is a reality – one that comes at the cost of their futures.
A variety of professional schools and graduate programs either require or give significant weight to volunteer experience during undergraduate years. For instance, medical and law schools ask applicants to submit a thorough portfolio of their experiences, called an autobiographical sketch. And post-graduate programs require students to submit their CVs as a key component of the application.
In theory, gaining volunteer experience is great.
For students, volunteering is an opportunity to build valuable skills, foster new relationships and learn more about their field of interest. On the other hand, for universities, a student’s volunteer work demonstrates their holistic qualities, allowing admissions teams to select candidates they believe will represent the institution’s visions and values.
However, gaining volunteer experience is not feasible for everyone. Students coming from low-income or socioeconomically disadvantaged households often juggle multiple courses and jobs just to make ends meet.
Is it truly fair to expect students to devote hours to unpaid work when they are worried about paying the month’s rent or providing for their families? Should they be more concerned about putting food on the table or committing to a leadership role to serve their community?
The short answer is no.
As much as volunteering demonstrates an applicant’s skills and qualities, it is a privilege – one that hinders students from achieving their full potential and traps them in a vicious cycle of income inequality.
As much as volunteering demonstrates an applicant’s skills and qualities, it is a privilege – one that hinders students from achieving their full potential and traps them in a vicious cycle of income inequality.
Volunteering requirements inadvertently pose barriers for talented individuals who lack the time or resources to commit to unpaid work, skewing the pool of applicants and matriculants to post-graduate programs.
In the context of low-income or disadvantaged students, paid experience should be equally valued and recognized by admission committees. Whether a student volunteered countless hours at a world-renowned research facility or worked long shifts at a fast-food restaurant shouldn’t matter. If admissions committees are truly looking for candidates with holistic qualities instead of stellar achievements, what should matter is the depth of learning students experience in their roles.
Higher education, and more importantly, the opportunity to pursue one’s dream career shouldn’t be a privilege solely afforded by rich kids.
As institutions begin to adopt and prioritize equity-based practices, it is imperative that universities work to remove obstacles for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds and find more inclusive ways to measure an applicant’s qualities or merit.
As institutions begin to adopt and prioritize equity-based practices, it is imperative that universities work to remove obstacles for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds and find more inclusive ways to measure an applicant’s qualities or merit.
By: Tanya Kett & Jillian Perkins Marsh
Some say that when they last attended a job fair employers told them to apply online, so they felt it was pointless to attend. If you have similar sentiments, I urge you to keep reading.
Employers may tell you to apply online (it does save paper!), but the real reason they are there is to get a sense of the person behind the resume that is submitted online — YOU.
Who are you? What do you have to offer? Why are you unique? Are you personable? Do you seem genuinely interested? What do you know about them? Answers to these questions can only be conveyed in an application to a certain extent. Make a real connection so that when your application does come across their desk, your name gets noticed.
How can you differentiate your application from other ones in the application pile?
Do your research. Explore the event website for the list of employers confirmed to attend and do some research on them before the event.
Tailor your elevator pitch. Make eye contact and shake their hand. Be bold, assertive, and with some confidence, introduce yourself. Tell them what you do or want to do, what you have to offer and why you are interested in them. Customize your pitch based on your research.
Ask useful questions. Based on your research, prepare some thoughtful questions to generate conversation after your introductions.
Be an active listener. Really listen to what they have to say; it is easy to start thinking ahead to what you will say next, but concentrate on being in the moment. After the conversation is over, jot down any suggestions they had for applicants before you forget.
Be ready to dig deeper. If you encounter an organization of interest that is not hiring in the area you are interested in, don’t despair. Remember that organizations recruit for many diverse roles and hiring timelines are often not predictable.
Invite to connect on LinkedIn. Visit your new contact’s profile and send your request from there, so you have an option to ‘Add a Note.’ Reference something from your conversation when you invite them to connect and thank them for their time in speaking with you at the event.
After you attend the event and employ the tactics above, you are ready to submit that online application. Don’t forget to mention the contact you spoke with at the Career Fair or Company Recruitment Event. Incorporate their suggestions and offer something you learned from them in your cover letter as part of why you are interested in applying.
Now imagine you did none of the above, just attended, had a few conversations and just applied online. Which application would you be most interested in?
Use what you’ve learned in this article at our SCENE networking night on March 21. This event is open to McMaster alumni and students in their final year. Register here: alumni.mcmaster.ca under Event Listings.
Read the full article on our Medium page.
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By Monica Takahashi
Applying to medical school is a strenuous and stressful process. In Ontario, you can choose to apply to six different schools, each of them with their own challenges. Arguably one of the biggest obstacles that applicants have to overcome when applying to medical school is the overwhelming cost.
Before even looking at the fees associated with the actual application, you have to consider the fees from the largest hurdle that med-hopeful students face: the Medical College Admission Test. Writing this test alone will put you out $315 USD. That fee is not including the review books, practice problems, practice tests, and preparation courses that you might need to be successful. So already, before you even register to the Ontario Medical School Application Services, you will have had to pay, on average, at least a few thousand dollars. Four out of the six medical schools in Ontario require at least one component of the MCAT, so if you choose to save substantial money by not writing this test, you will be at a significant disadvantage.
Now let’s look at the fees associated with OMSAS. The best way to increase your chances of getting an interview is to apply to as many schools as possible; it’s simple statistics. And yet, not everyone is able to afford this. Each school will cost anywhere from $100 to $125 to apply, plus a standard $220 OMSAS application service fee. This is excluding the fee that some universities charge their students for transcript requests.
Here at McMaster University, we’re lucky we don’t have to worry about this transcript fee, however small. So in a “best case scenario” where you apply to all six medical schools, you will have to pay at least $920, not including the possible transcript-request fee. Do you see the issue there? How can the best case scenario be the one where students are forced to pay just under $1000?
The high price of medical school applications fosters an environment where wealthy parents are able to give their children every resource possible, so they are successful entering medical school, become rich, and can then send their children to medical school. And so the cycle of wealth continues.
If you are paying so much for a service meant to merely submit your application, it’s reasonable to assume that this service will make the submission process as stress-free as possible, right? This was not the case for the 2018-2019 application cycle.
The application for this cycle was due on Oct. 1, 2018 at 4:30 p.m. Around 3:00 p.m. on the day of the deadline, OMSAS malfunctioned. It was so bad, in fact, that OMSAS had to extend the application deadline to 11:59.
https://twitter.com/RREnoorani/status/1046862579157602304
[spacer height="20px"]Imagine finishing your application, going to press submit, and the software just refusing to cooperate. Frankly, this is extremely disappointing for such an expensive service. Students are already at a disadvantage having to pay such hefty fees, and having the stress of being unable to submit their application on-time is a little insulting.
https://twitter.com/lindy_zh/status/1046908638550532096
[spacer height="20px"]In the end, the application was extended until Oct. 3, 2018. You know what the worst part is? When I went back to OMSAS News to verify the times, all of the posts associated with OMSAS system issues had been deleted.
Thankfully, I saved a screenshot of the OMSAS news post made the day of the application deadline. I find it incredibly insulting that, after such a catastrophic event, OMSAS chose to cover its tail and hide any sign of issues. “Out of sight, out of mind”, right? Wrong. Hundreds of students who were made to suffer through this error will remember.
[spacer height="20px"]I understand that sometimes things go wrong and systems malfunction. The problem arises when rather than owning up to your mistakes, you try to hide as if the problem had never occurred.
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