Engaging in work experience—whether through paid employment, internships, or volunteer roles—is a powerful way to explore and affirm your interest in a healthcare career. These experiences offer opportunities to build essential skills like empathy, responsibility, teamwork, and cultural awareness, while helping you understand the realities of working in service of others.

Hands-on roles in healthcare settings—such as hospital internships, free clinics, or public health outreach—can provide firsthand exposure to the patient experience and help you evaluate whether a clinical environment is right for you. However, impactful learning can also happen in non-healthcare contexts. Tutoring, working at food banks, supporting housing initiatives, or customer service jobs can all deepen your understanding of human needs and communication—skills that translate directly to healthcare.

Ultimately, admissions committees value experiences that reflect your initiative, civic-mindedness, and sincere desire to help others. Whether the experience was paid or unpaid, in a hospital or a community center, what matters is that you’re actively learning and demonstrating the kind of commitment and compassion that healthcare demands.

If you’re curious and love asking “why,” research might be for you. Joining a lab or clinical research team lets you explore questions that drive healthcare forward. You’ll learn how discoveries translate into better patient care, and you’ll develop analytical skills that are valuable no matter what path you choose. Research also provides opportunities for you to develop and demonstrate important skills like working independently, problem solving, critical thinking, and communication of complex information (both verbally and in writing).  Finally, a research mentor who knows you well, thinks highly of you, and values your contribution to the team can often be the author of a very strong letter of recommendation.

Internships offer hands-on, structured experience where you can put your classroom learning into action. You might help with administrative tasks in a hospital, assist in a lab, or support community health programs. These roles often come with mentorship opportunities and help you build confidence and professional connections. Through internships, you can develop skills in professionalism and professional communication, as well as a track record of productivity in the workspace.

Taking on leadership positions in student groups or community projects shows that you can motivate others and handle responsibility. Maybe you organize a blood drive, lead a campus health club, or coordinate a mental health awareness week. These experiences highlight your ability to take initiative and work well with others — both essential in healthcare. Like healthcare providers, leaders must take on accountability and communicate effectively – success in leadership often predicts success in a healthcare setting.

While work and volunteer experiences often focus on individual-level service and skill development, community outreach and advocacy allow you to step back and engage with broader social and systemic factors that shape public health. Activities like supporting health education campaigns, leading wellness workshops, participating in voter registration drives related to healthcare policy, or organizing events around mental health awareness give you insight into the root causes of health disparities and the importance of equitable access to care.

Through this kind of involvement, you’ll cultivate skills in public speaking, collaboration, and cultural humility, while deepening your understanding of communities unlike your own. These experiences help you become not just a future provider, but a public health advocate—someone who sees patients as part of a larger social fabric and works toward change that benefits them all.

Shadowing is like getting a behind-the-scenes pass to a healthcare career. By following a  healthcare professional throughout their day, you can observe patient interactions, see how teams collaborate, and get a sense of the pace and demands of the job. This can help you decide if a certain role fits your strengths and interests.  Shadowing experiences across different fields can be valuable, as comparing different types of work can help you to be more sure what is right for you.  Consider making a list of pros and cons to help yourself compare different shadowing experiences.  Keep in mind that shadowing is typically just observing and not actually doing the work – you will need to do the work in the future and you will likely need to use evidence developed from more ‘hands on’ engagement experiences (appropriate for your skills, knowledge, and licensure) to demonstrate that you are ready to be trained to do more.  In some cases shadowing can be hard to formally arrange.  In these cases, consider requesting an interview or conversation to learn from a healthcare professional first hand