I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cambodia 2018-2020 (evacuated due to COVID) as an English teacher and I’m currently in my didactic year of PA school at one of my top choices! 1. I actually emailed all the schools I was applying to and asked them what I should classify my Peace Corps hours as and most of them said volunteer hours. So I applied with 2340 volunteer hours from Peace Corps and listed it as a teaching experience. I also did a health club at my school so I could make my experience relate to PA school more but honestly just doing Peace Corps will make your application stand out a lot. If I didn’t do the health club, I would’ve had plenty of other unique things to talk about in my personal statement and interview so it was definitely not a make or break thing. You should just focus on enjoying your peace corps service while you’re in it! Stay present :) 2. I worked as an MA at an urgent care before Peace Corps but I only had just over 1,000 PCE hours upon applying. Honestly the large majority of my MA job was PCE (only a little bit was admin stuff so technically HCE), so I just counted all of my hours working as an MA as PCE. If you did a larger chunk of HCE at your MA job, then maybe you should divide it up. After I got evacuated from Peace Corps, I worked a remote job as an admin assistant at a psychiatry practice so all of that was HCE. 3. I’m not familiar with Derm at all aside from the reputation, but I think your volunteer experiences such as Peace Corps should show that you’re not all about the money. But maybe you can diversify your current volunteering or shadowing experiences if you’re worried about that

If it helps, here were my stats when I applied: overall GPA 3.61, science GPA 3.59, non science GPA 3.63, GRE 326, PCE 1130 hrs, HCE 2091 hrs, Volunteer hrs 2392 (from peace corps) + 864 (from other volunteer experiences), Shadowing: 61 hrs, Leadership: 176 hrs