 what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose today i'm going to be making a video all about work experience what is work experience how can you get it what should you do to go about getting it and just some general tips and advice that you guys should keep in mind when looking for work experience and when actually on work experience if you guys don't know who i am my name is nasir i'm a second year medic at king's college london and i make these youtube videos to try and help you guys in your goals of getting accepted into medical school hopefully find them useful and if you want to follow me on my journey subscribe to this channel if you don't follow me on instagram quickly quickly quickly go go go hit that follow button let's get right into the topic of this video which is all about work experience so when you're in high school and you're doing your applications for medical school one of the biggest things and one of the increasingly important parts of the application is gaining work experience now there are many reasons to get work experience one of them is that you almost have to in order to apply to medicines become a requirement for a lot of medical schools now so what really is work experience work experience is when you go to the place of work where you hope to have a career in the future to sort of see what it's like to get a feel for the area to get a feel for what it is that someone in that position does and this is really beneficial for you it lets you know if this is something that you actually want to do for example i have a lot of friends who when we were in high school everyone wanted to do medicine i want to be a doctor i want to do medicine blah blah blah and then some of them went to work experience and they came back saying wow that's not at all what i thought being a doctor was i don't want to do this anymore and trust me you want to know what you're getting into before you begin the path to medicine because it is a long one now like i said work experience is becoming increasingly important in the application and that's because it's a very good way to show the admissions team that you actually know what you're talking about you have to show the admissions team that you have a realistic understanding of what studying medicine is that you know that medicine is something that you want to do and that you don't just think of scrubs or Grey's Anatomy or whatever when you think about medicine you actually know that a hospital is extremely chaotic you know that you're going to have to be faced with difficult decisions you know that you're going to have to be managing people leading people medical schools want to see that you are aware of all this stuff before you apply to medicine it's also an amazing opportunity for you to develop yourself you can build on your interpersonal skills shut up you can build on your interpersonal skills you can practice you know talking to people who you don't know who might be different than you from different backgrounds ethnicities mental states whatever it is so i want this video to kind of act as like a fyi or by the way about work experience just to tell you guys some advice and general tips and things about work experience that you might not have known that'll hopefully help you get started on your journey to finding work experience and knowing what to expect when it comes to it okay so the first thing you want to do is decide what the actual work experience is that you want what is it that you're looking for is it shadowing someone for example a doctor or healthcare assistant or a pharmacist is a volunteering at an elderly home at a youth disability center or do you want a sort of taster of multiple different things a sort of traditional work experience shadowing means that you follow an individual for example a doctor throughout the day for maybe a couple of days or a week and you see exactly what it is they do every hour of their day and that gives you a really good insight into what medicine is and what it could be like for you to be a doctor in the future the second type of work experience is what's called like volunteering which is where you go and you basically try and help out with whatever the staff needs throughout the day but it's also a good way for you to get involved in that area and see what it's like for yourself whatever it is just try and immerse yourself in the medical field really any experience where you're talking to other people where you're dealing with other people is going to be very useful and translatable directly to medicine the second thing is that different schools require different amounts and different kinds of work experience and i'll post a link in the description below showing all the different schools in the uk and what it is they look for when it comes to work experience so if you know you want to apply to a certain set of schools make sure you check that list first but anyway have a read of it so you know what kinds of things they're looking for for example you see that many schools want you to work in an area where dealing with other people and helping other people is the main or primary focus you might see that some schools specifically maybe for graduate entry medicine students want to see specific shadowing or specific volunteer experience in a hospital it really depends so check out this list and make sure you're familiar with it the third thing i want to say is apply early early early early and i can't stress that enough these places are so competitive there are many other students just like you who want to find work experience and believe me they're going to be applying early as well so really apply as early as you can these places get filled up very quickly and you want to give yourself that advantage the fourth thing is that when you're searching for these work experiences of course google is very useful and you can reach out to people by email but i would highly highly recommend placing a call in via your phone or whatever or going into the place physically and this i think is a huge advantage because very few students are going to be willing to place a call and even fewer students are going to be willing to go in physically to the location it's so much easier for a staff member to hire a face that they actually know that they've dealt with them to respond to and hire someone from an email so really if you can go in and make that first impression you may be bringing a cv with you or something like that it's really going to go a long way when it comes to finding work experience try and make that physical connection whether it's over the phone or in person i know it can be scary going in person but trust me putting a face to the name is extremely extremely valuable so tip number five is about how do you get work experience who do you ask who do you talk to and the answer to this is really anyone and everyone anyone who you know who's even remotely related to the nhs talk to them and see if they can find someone who you can work with or shadow or volunteer to help you get that work experience if you have any contact with from your family or from your school this is the time to use them visit your school talk to the person involved in helping you get into medical school and they should be able to help you find work experiences they should be able to help connect you and of course in the end you need to do your own research you need to go and google scavenge the different local hospitals the different local gps in your area give them calls send them emails going in person and talk to the right people to make sure you get that work experience the sixth thing is that i know that some hospitals have a requirement of being 18 or older before you can work or volunteer in them and some gp practices have requirement of being over the age of 16 so make sure you look into those things make sure you know any requirements that you have to have before actually applying or before trying to connect with that area really just make sure you know what it is you're applying to number seven is that before you actually get accepted into any of these hospitals or volunteer positions you might get interviewed and this probably won't be super formal it'll probably be more like a casual conversation just to see that you're an okay person who can enter these environments but you might want to practice a little bit your formal speaking skills you might want to explore your reasons for wanting to do medicine your reasons for volunteering just in case they ask you so that you have something to say number eight so once you actually make it to your work experience obviously you want to dress smart you want to be polite you want to be searching for opportunities asking people where you can help where you can do things just to make a really valuable experience for yourself but the most important thing and I can stress this enough can't stress this enough the most important thing you have to do is reflect on your experiences the end of the day it doesn't matter where you volunteered who you volunteered what you did the important thing is how you reflect on them and how you show the admissions committee what it is that you learned from those experiences so what I recommend is that throughout the day you have a notebook if anything cool or interesting happens just jot it down a little bit but at the end of the day you want to really sit down for like half an hour and pick your brain about the experiences that you had throughout that day reflect on everything what did you see how did it make you feel what did you learn is there anything that made you uncomfortable is there anything that made you happy just anything reflect reflect reflect write down all these thoughts and feelings because when it comes to interview time these notes are going to be invaluable to you you're really going to wish you had done this so trust me reflect every single day on all the activities that you did do it number nine is if you can try and obtain multiple work experiences the goal isn't to just shadow the same doctor or multiple doctors many different times you want to do different experiences that give you different insights and aspects to medicine if you can do shadowing maybe a pharmacist or volunteering at a care home and then working in a gp and then maybe working at a disability center or in an elderly home you want to try and get a wide range of experiences a so that you know that you actually want to do this because your work is going to involve all these different things but b so that you can show the admissions committee that you actually know what it means to be a doctor you know what it means to be in the medical field and you know that this is something you want to do so i would advocate to get a range of experiences if you can and number 10 work experience is obviously very useful it's something you definitely want to do and it can help you a lot both for yourself and for the application but if you can't find a specific medical related work experience don't worry too much a lot of other experiences are directly useful and directly translatable to medicine anything you do can have applicable skills and can be translated to medicine and being a doctor there's leadership there's management there's communication there's searching for detail there's adapting there's all these things that you can learn in other kinds of experiences other kinds of work experiences that aren't necessarily related to medicine anywhere where you're out of your comfort zone you're dealing with different people and you're having to adapt it's just going to be very very relatable and useful for medicine also if you do something a bit different it can really give you a unique advantage when applying to medical school you want to have something that stands out something that's really unique on your application that makes the admissions committee say wow like let me let me think about this twice let me read this again because when they're reading hundreds of applications they want to see something different that stands out for example when i was at university i was working on the aerospace team we were working on building some experiments that would go on a satellite that was going to get launched by nasa so that was really cool something that was really out there just have something unique and different on your application if you can that'll go a long long way and the last thing i want to say i'm going to put some links in the description for some useful resources by the bmj even medify has this page where you can search for for work experiences that are near you they have this map and you can like click your address and you'll see what's close by to you that might be a good place to start also do your own research on google and whatever but i i'll post a bunch of links in the description that will hopefully help you all right guys and that's it for this video if you liked it make sure you leave a like on this video subscribe to the channel if you want to see more videos from me i hope you liked it hope you found it useful and i'll see you in the next one peace