Hot take: Volunteering being a pretty hard requirement to get into medical school defeats the point of volunteering. it's no longer altruistic- people are literally doing it with the hopes of getting something in return i.e. a med school acceptance. Admissions committees are encouraging inauthenticity, SPECIFICALLY the institutions that have no volunteering graduation requirement for their med students.

Research is another thing. Research is slowly becoming a requirement for admission, presumably because all schools want to be amongst the big "research schools". Scientific inquiry is extremely important in medicine, but is that not exercised in the required lab courses?

The grand result is this homogenization of pre-meds. I feel like it's getting more difficult to figure out who is passionate about what. You can't even figure that out through essays and interviews because the questions are so targeted; if you have a prompt on research, you must speak on research, prompt on volunteering you must speak on volunteering etc. The lack of freedom creates a homogeneous pool of applicants that are harder to understand.

What do you guys think?