Professional Outreach
Help PHS invite healthcare professionals to speak at our virtual shadowing sessions. This is our most popular volunteer opportunity — you can work on your own time, earn hours, and directly expand access for students worldwide.
What Professional Outreach is
Professional Outreach is how we invite providers and health-adjacent professionals to share their careers and experiences with students through PHS virtual shadowing sessions. Each successful connection helps students explore healthcare paths they might not otherwise have access to.
Why this matters
Volunteers have helped PHS reach out to tens of thousands of providers over the past few years. Outreach keeps our sessions fresh, diverse, and accessible for students everywhere.
Why volunteers love it
It’s fully asynchronous — you set your own schedule, work at your own pace, and can earn a lot of hours over time while making a real impact.
How to do Professional Outreach
Our system is designed to prevent duplicates and keep outreach organized for everyone. Please follow these steps every time.
Confirm they’re not already in the database
Open the Professional Database and Ctrl/Cmd + F their email. If it’s already listed, do not reach out.
Source professionals yourself
Use your community, school networks, LinkedIn, clinic/hospital websites, faculty pages, professional associations, conference lists, and more.
Tip: prioritize roles that align with student interests (medicine, nursing, PA, PT/OT, dentistry, mental health, public health, research, health tech, etc.).
Verify the email + submit via the form
Double-check spelling and formatting, then submit the outreach through the website form. Once submitted, the system automatically logs it for future volunteers.
This prevents duplicate outreach and keeps our system clean and fair for the entire volunteer team.
Quality matters (and it’s easy)
Great outreach is simple: find the right person, verify the correct email, confirm they’re not already in our database, and submit through the form. Small details keep our outreach professional and effective.
Quick quality checklist
✅ I searched the email in the database (Ctrl/Cmd + F)
✅ The professional is a strong fit for PHS
✅ The email is verified + correctly typed
✅ I submitted through the outreach form (not manual edits)
Hours & Verification
We want this to be rewarding and fair. Hours are verified using our outreach tracking system.
How we verify hours
Volunteer hours are verified based on the number of outreach emails sent through the form, since each submission is tracked and added to the database automatically.
Keeping it fair for everyone
Please log hours honestly. Inflated or unverifiable hours may be declined during verification. We also reserve the right to refuse writing Letters of Recommendation (LORs) if we cannot confirm hours or contributions.
This is simply to protect the credibility of volunteer verification for everyone who puts in real effort.
Resources
Everything you need to get started — open these in new tabs while you work.
Outreach Form
Use this to send outreach emails. Submissions auto-log to the database.
Professional Database
Required pre-check: Ctrl/Cmd + F by email to avoid duplicates. No edits needed.
Suggested places to source
• Hospital/clinic staff pages
• University faculty directories
• LinkedIn (verified roles)
• Professional associations
• Conference/event speaker lists