Hi,
I know I’m only a high school senior, but I’m starting to think about going the MD/PhD route and wondered if anyone had advice. For example, how do I go about finding a doctor to shadow? or what I should do during my summers?
I’m going to tag @iwannabe_Brown and @plumazul who are MD/PhD students for you. They may have more specific advice for you.
MD/PhD programs are research intensive and generally require significant undergraduate research experience, particularly research where you have a role in the ultimate success or failure of the project. (BTW, science has lots of failed projects and inconclusive results–so that doesn’t disqualify you for a PhD or MD/PhD.) If it is at all possible you should try to do an independent research project/senior research thesis as part of your undergraduate work.
Summers during college typically involve working in a research lab either at your home college or at a REU. The recommendation(s) you get from your PI(s) will be very important for a MD/PhD application.
As for the rest–shadowing, clinical volunteering/employment, community service, leadership etc—you find those opportunities like every other hopeful pre-med. Shadowing involves asking lots of doctors (and getting refused by most of them)–start with your own personal physician/family friends & acquaintances/doctors you meet while volunteering–and network, network, network.
BTW, you don’t need a ton of shadowing. Just enough so you will know that you want to spent the next 50 years of your life ministering to the sick, injured, dying, mentally ill, elderly demented and their families. Try to shadow in variety of specialties, especially primary care fields.
First and foremost your summers should be spent doing research as doing research full time is very different from the only part time you’ll be able to do during the school year. It’s pretty easy to do something in addition to research during the summer (e.g. shadowing/volunteering) but I’d say finding a research opportunity should be #1 priority for any given summer.
GPA is less important than MD only but still very important so I wouldn’t bother trying to get involved in research until 2nd semester freshman year at the absolute earliest (plus you probably don’t have either the necessary knowledge or skills at the moment). This is where doing research at your home institution can be better than an REU or some other summer program because you can spend 2nd semester freshman year doing more scut work type stuff (mixing reagents, sorting flies or whatever else the lab does) a few hours/week so that come summer, when you’re able to put in 40+ hours/week you already know what the lab does and how it functions and can begin to learn actual science (experimental design, data analysis, etc). It’s also ideal to work in 1 or 2 labs over a long period of time both from an LOR standpoint and from a productivity standpoint. Anytime you join a new lab you’re going to have to spend time getting up to speed both from a knowledge standpoint and a skills standpoint.
As wowmom said, by the time you apply (summer after junior year if you don’t plan on taking any time off between undergrad and MD/PhD) you should have some small independent project that you are in charge of, but don’t expect to jump right into that. Do expect PIs to promise the opportunity for growth into that role from the beginning though. I’m assuming you have no lab experience (which is typical) so be willing to start out doing the stuff a trained monkey could do to prove you can follow directions and won’t be a walking source of contamination and lab errors. It shouldn’t be too long until you are assisting grad students and post docs with actual experiments and then you’ll work your way up.
The two big questions every MD/PhD program is looking to answer in their applicants are “is this person committed to research” and “why is this person not just doing an MD or a PhD.” The first one is answered by your research experience and how you talk about it. The 2nd is a mix of your research (not all research benefits from an MD) and things like shadowing and volunteering that demonstrate a desire to actually be a physician.