<p>Hi, I'm going to be doing chemical engineering this fall and was wondering if I should do research in college in my field or something more related to life sciences, given the fact that I will be applying to medical school? Is this sort of thing frowned upon?</p>
<p>Should I pass up a mentoring (I would be the protege) opportunity in chemical engineering research for a life science research opportunity. By "mentoring", i just don't mean I learn from the person. The person would advise me throughout college and stuff.</p>
<p>Specifically, this mentoring program is Inventis at University of Maryland. Not many people on the UMD forums seem to know much about it.</p>
<p>If there's anything I've learned, it's that you never know when being an expert in a slightly off-topic field will make you the star of the show.</p>
<p>My dad's a radiologist with a background in engineering, and while driving to school every day when I was a kid, he would explain the principles of radiation to me... or of calculus, or physics, or what-have-you. At any rate, whereas other structural engineers don't know what backscatter is, and have no idea how to pronounce "Roentgen", I'm pretty familiar with the ideas behind radiation and shielding and things. I design mainly hospitals now, and I've earned a lot of brownie points by totally understanding what's going on when we design MRI suites and answering all the questions of the principals-in-charge.</p>
<p>Whatever you end up doing for your research, it'll teach you the process of research (which is the really valuable point of doing undergrad research), and it'll probably teach you a subject that's so narrow that it's probably not going to make your med school courses spectacularly easier. If the mentoring program sounds like a good deal, don't bypass it in favor of maybe doing something that's more applicable to med school... You never know whether it'll be applicable or not! Odds are, it'll help you in some random, obscure way later in life.</p>
<p>Oh, I just want to clarify that I already have some research experience in high school (in microbiology), so getting the feel of research should not be so hard.</p>