"Briefly describe your most important exposure to clinical medicine."
(University of Maryland)
"Please describe any experiences in a clinical setting (such as a hospital, physicians office, nursing home, hospice, etc.)."
(University of New Mexico)
While shadowing a physician is almost by definition a passive activity, clinical experiences show medical schools that you've also rolled up your sleeves and personally interacted with real patients in health-care environments—even if it was only to empty bedpans. Gaining clinical experience of some kind is even more critical than shadowing. You simply must do it. Fortunately, clinical experience can take many different forms, as the following perfect phrases suggest.
A few weeks later I found myself pushing open the rough-hewn door of a rural clinic in Gode, Ethiopia, 300 miles and several centuries from the nearest city. The work was life-altering. A queue of patients, suffering from malnutrition and other effects of poverty none of our four physicians could hope to cure, stretched for a block outside our makeshift clinic. For 10 hours a day, I helped a surgeon with ultrasounds, comforted female patients during checkups, and made evening house calls with doctors. I felt a woman's belly that was so full of tumors I knew she had little time left, though she at first did not. She left our clinic possessing the knowledge to make her own decisions about her final days. Though I'd left behind my car, my home, and all the familiar trappings of success, I never felt more complete. I left Ethiopia not knowing the words in Amarigna to express how tired I felt, but I was more certain than ever that medicine was my calling I was made for.
On my third day volunteering in the ER at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, I watched as a multiple-gunshot victim was wheeled in and intubated. After one of the paramedics performed chest compressions, without a second thought I immediately took over the compressions while the paramedic gave his report. The physicians responded with rapid-fire instructions, and nurses quickly began administering medication. But the patient's chest cavity was filling with blood, and when a chest tube was inserted, blood gushed out of it onto the table, the floor, and those of us who were nearby. A bullet had shredded his aorta, and there was nothing more we could do. As the nurses began cleaning up, I noticed a piece of plastic on the floor. It was the victim's driver's license. That day he had just turned 21. As I stood there, the victim's license in my hands, my arms shaking with exhaustion, I learned my first powerful lesson about medicine: it will not always prevail.