Getting your first clinical experience is the hardest task of all of premed in my opinion. This is especially true if you have nobody in your family in the medical field like I did. Thankfully, there are still plenty of ways for you to get your first clinical experience and I will walk you through what I did along with some of the opportunities available for you. Best of luck and I hope these land you that clinical job!
Now, I’ve written a number of tutorials on how to become certified in various medical positions. However, a big question that lingers nearly as a prerequisite is how do you even get your first clinical experience opportunity? How do you find doctors to shadow? How do you apply for clinical jobs?
The process is not as complicated as you may think, but one of the biggest keys here is your connections and who you know. But you may be thinking “I don’t know any doctors and nobody in my family is a doctor either!”. I thought the same way reading things early on in my journey because that was my reality. Nobody in the family was a doctor and we certainly didn’t know anyone that was a family friend who was either. I had no clue where to start really but I would like to share a couple of things that I have learned since.
You may not know a family friend doctor, but you probably see one at least every once in a while when you get a check up! Your family physician who may likely have been seeing you since you were a little child. I did not have one when I was looking for clinical opportunities, but I had plenty of friends who did. They would go to their yearly or whatever interval check up and mention during the conversation that they were wanting to consider a medical career and were looking for a doctor to shadow. They followed this up with asking their physician if they could shadow them or work for them and offered to be willing to receive any training necessary during the first week or two of the job. This wasn’t a guarantee, but if it is something you haven’t thought of, give it a try! If you got a shadowing spot, find out how to get the most out of it here.
If you are still in high school, this will most definitely apply to you. Check if your high school has internship programs! Mine had something called an honors mentorship program. Essentially, you applied for the program and indicated what career you would want and the field. There was an interview phase and they asked some get to know me questions and we talked about what kind of healthcare facility I’d want to be placed in. The coordinator did all of the work of forming relationships with local healthcare practices and placed me at an urgent care nearby my high school! No work required on my part to find the physicians. Not to mention, this internship counted as a high school “class” and my first two periods of 7 for the day was to be spent at the internship! I was getting school credit AND clinical experience! Here, you can build a mentor relationship with the physician and potentially earn a letter of recommendation. Additionally, I recommend that you ask to be trained as a medical assistant or care tech while there. They will likely be happy to do so! This is easily the best thing you can get into as it really sets you up to get any clinical medical assisting job you would want once you get to college.
This last tip applies to anyone. I’ll start off telling my story so you can see how it worked. Essentially, I was a part of a religious organization at my university when I first arrived and was still trying to get to know the pastor and the community service projects they did. One interesting thing they did was “one on ones” at the local coffee shop where the pastor would meet with incoming freshman and talk about the organization, how our transition to college was, and anything else we wanted to discuss. I would say at the time I was on the third one of these, I was still struggling to find clinical experiences or connections in this new town since I’d grown up hours away. They ended up asking me if I was trying to go to graduate school and what I wished to do. I told them and it kickstarted a conversation about medicine. Towards the end of the conversation, I casually mentioned that I had been looking for a physician to work for or shadow as I’d not really gotten the chance to see anything besides family medicine. Off the top of their head, they named 3 physicians they personally new and offered to get me in touch with all of them! All because I’d mentioned it off handedly at the end of a conversation!
Now I’m not saying open all your conversations with “Hi, I’m looking for shadowing”, but once you’ve built friendships with some adults on campus or gotten to know some organization leaders, you can just mention it and see what happens. You truly never know who knows people and their recommendation can get you in with special treatment. I was asked to shadow within a week later and the connection led to many research and clinical opportunities with that physician down the road.
The last tip I have is look to see if your college or counselors have a pre-health professions advisor or department. For my university, we had an advisor and she had a canvas course we could enroll into with all this information about applying etc. One of the best things about that canvas course was that she had local physicians and hospitals reaching out to her regularly looking for students to work for them. The best part? She sent these opportunities out as announcements to those on the canvas course and my friends and I ended up getting some really good experiences and leads from it. Check it out at your college or school!