Your nursing job will open you up to many opportunities to strengthen your medical school application. Here I will list some strategies on how to make the most of your nursing experience and how I took advantage of my healthcare role to boost my extracurriculars.
Clinical Experience
- Shadowing physicians: Take advantage of your position to reach out to physicians you work alongside to shadow them on your day off. Request to shadow doctors in various specialties to gain a broader understanding of the medical field. Do you work on a cardiology floor but interested in pediatric medicine? Ask the pediatric cardiologist if you can shadow them or if they know a pediatrician you can work with! I shadowed several physicians including a family medicine doctor I met while working in a community health center, an oncologist who was a former RN, and an electrophysiologist I worked with in the Cath lab!
- Direct Patient Care: Highlight your hands-on experience with patients and try to document cases where you have made a significant impact in the healthcare team. I had over 10,000 hours of direct patient care by the time I applied to medical school!
Professional Networking
- Mentorship: I found the physicians I worked with and shadowed were extremely supportive during my application period. Don’t be shy and reach out to the physicians you work with for career development and advice.
- Letters of Recommendation (LOR): My strongest LOR came from a pulmonologist that worked with in the Cath lab. In my nursing role, I prepped his patient’s for their right heart catheterizations by starting their deep brachial vein access with an ultrasound IV. Often, his patients had difficult diseases and conversations about their health were quite sensitive and emotional. By building a trusting relationship with this pulmonologist over three years and caring for his patients, I was able to secure a strong LOR for medical school from him. I will always be grateful for his support but my position as a nurse allowed me to show him my strengths and he was able to confidently recommend me.
Research Opportunities
- Clinical Research: Did you know there are research nurse jobs? Try searching for available positions in your area! Typically, the job entails running research projects with a team of coordinators. Nurses collect informed consent, draw labs, administer trial medications, and perform the clinical trial tests for patients. I held a position like this for almost a year which gave me research experience to add to my AMCAS application. Though I did not have any publications by the time I applied, one of my good friends (also former RN, now MD) did. She wrote up an article for nurses about how to care for patients with Ebstein’s anomaly (a cardiac condition) and it was accepted in a prestigious nursing journal. Keep an open mind and you will find opportunities for research!
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
- Quality Improvement (QI) Projects: Your hospital system or clinic will love you for doing this and it can help your application! I helped with a QI project and added it to the research section in my AMCAS. If you’re curious, my QI project was focused on performing invasive procedures on pediatric patients outside of their original hospital room to protect their safe space.
Community Engagement
- Volunteer: Search for free clinics in your area and see if they have positions for nurses. I helped triage at a local free clinic and got some volunteer clinical hours that was both rewarding and allowed me to engage with my community.
- Health education: Reach out to the local library and offer to conduct a free health education session for the community. This may help demonstrate your commitment to preventive care and public health. My local library held a free refugee health fair where I did blood pressure screenings!
Leadership
- Leadership Roles: Take on leadership positions within your nursing unit or professional organizations. On my unit, I was part of the rotating charge nurses and on the scheduling committee. These roles show your ability to lead and manage healthcare teams.
Teaching and Mentoring
- Preceptorship: When nursing students or new nurses would rotate onto our unit, I helped precept them. Guiding and supporting new nurses as they transition from academics to clinical practice demonstrates your commitment to education and professional development.
Write stuff down!
- Personal statement: When I had patients interactions that left a lasting impact on me, I wrote it down in my journal. I documented failures I experienced as a new nurse and how I learned from it, I reflected on advice given to me by my geriatric patients, and many highs and lows I felt over the years. This collection of reflections helped me a craft a compelling and strong personal statement. I even received a tuition scholarship due to my one of my secondary personal statements.
- Activities: Now that you have read through the list of extracurricular opportunities available to nurses, make sure you log everything you do, when you did it and what role you had. It will come in handy when it comes time to input that data into your AMCAS application.
