Voluntourism and Medical School Admissions: Why It Can Hurt Your Application

Whether you're a high school student hoping to pursue pre-med in college or a current pre-med college student, the path to medical school requires a series of choices, including how to use your precious time, energy, resources, and strengths to present the most compelling and competitive application when the time comes. I often share what to do as I guide people on this path, but today I’m sharing one choice not to make on this journey: voluntourism.

Key Takeaways:

• Voluntourism combines short-term volunteering with tourism and often centers the volunteer’s experience rather than the needs of the community. 
  
• Medical schools tend to view voluntourism critically because it reflects short-term engagement rather than sustained, meaningful service.
  
• Short-term medical volunteering abroad can raise serious ethical concerns, especially when untrained students are allowed to participate in clinical settings.
  
• Long-term, community based service and clinical roles are stronger and more ethical ways to prepare for medical school.
  
  

What Is Voluntourism?

Voluntourism is a phenomenon targeting people who want to serve and contribute as volunteers in communities, typically distant ones, while visiting and exploring a place as tourists; many such programs are in Central America or the Caribbean. Programs often involve working in clinics to complete blood pressure screenings, teach health education, or conduct community health assessments. It’s a captivating idea for college students and their families, especially pre-meds. How great would it be to see a new place, while building your resume by volunteering for a meaningful cause, and ideally have a healthy dose of fun in the process?

Why Medical Schools Discourage Voluntourism

Don’t do it. Such opportunities fly in the face of everything medical schools want to see.  Voluntourism gigs are inherently short-term engagements, and schools want to see growth through long-term commitments. Voluntourism is highly extractive, meaning programs take much more than they give.  Programs like the Global Medical Brigades, for instance, offer appealing language about sustainable impact, but in reality they often deplete communities through attention of local health professionals, taking their time away from the job of serving and supporting communities, instead serving and supporting pre-med students from affluent backgrounds. 

Remember, medical schools are seeking meaningful contributions that have the potential to improve lives; voluntourism, conversely, is the playground for the affluent. Worst of all, they sometimes encourage profound ethical transgressions, like allowing students to learn to suture or otherwise practice clinical skills on human beings, without the qualifications to do so. This is both human experimentation and a terribly dis-continuitous form of care.  

Why Voluntourism Might Harm Your Medical School Application

Spending ten days on a Central American vacation, dedicating only a few mornings to taking free blood pressure readings or encouraging people to make dietary changes (that they cannot afford), doesn't prove you're a humanitarian. It proves you have the resources to take a nice vacation that transparently masquerades as a trip to help people. Medical schools won't buy it. This is a common topic among the professionals in the Consortium for Universities in Global Health, for instance, which has tight links to medical school; I developed my own expertise on this topic when I managed a global health program at the University of Washington, learning just how problematic these programs are.  This is all to say, schools carefully watch for these programs.  

Think Globally, Act Locally

Let’s dive a little deeper. If you are reading this, you likely want to attend medical school in the United States. As such, you should be gathering experiences here, in the settings where you’ll likely work in the future. If you mistakenly think you can only understand suffering and ill-health elsewhere, look harder—it’s everywhere in the United States, too. Prove you want to help people by serving those in your own community. The struggles of poverty, limited access to health care, and low health literacy, among others, transcend borders, and you don’t need to travel far away to learn about these phenomena. Think globally by acting locally.

Ethical Concerns With Short-Term Medical Volunteering Abroad

Furthermore, you cannot come to understand a place or culture through a 1-2 week visit, and this tourism often requires huge investments from those communities—meeting and retraining volunteers weekly, helping visitors through cultural adjustment and language obstacles, and being treated as learning laboratories for (mostly affluent) American kids. It is imperative that aspiring medical school applicants not treat other human beings as bodies for experimentation. Foregrounding this ethical transgression on an application is a certain path to rejection.

Medical school preparation is a big market, as evidenced by the vigor with which companies offering these opportunities target high school students and their families. The winner in these arrangements is not the students or the communities where the programs happen—it’s the riches for the entities that organize them. You won’t improve your application through the hollow showmanship these programs engender.

Better Alternatives to Voluntourism for Pre-Med Students

What should you do instead? Get to work in your current community or in the community where you’ll likely work—as an EMT, medical assistant, phlebotomist, certified nursing assistant, or other clinical role. You can also volunteer for great causes at home, like Planned Parenthood, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross, AmeriCorps, your local refugee resettlement organization, or a shelter you know that is doing meaningful work. Such programs typically require long-term commitments because that’s the key to real service, and it’s certainly the key to your growth.

The Bottom Line

Bigger picture, and voluntourism aside, true service is at its heart a commitment to the well-being of others, as defined by the community where you work, and humbly offering your labor as a contribution to a cause.  Learn from people, don’t act on them–which can only come from the humility to engage longitudinally with others who lead you. Stay away from seductive, token gestures that look impressive on social media but lack substance. The more your service is purely about the wellness of others, the stronger your character, resume, and application will be.