<p>Would an internship in medicinal chemistry / drug discovery at a big pharmaceutical company look good on a med school app? I think it'll be a valuable experience considering my interests and the nature of the internship, but I'm afraid it might be too much chemistry and too little biology (in fact, it's almost all chemistry) ... I'm considering MD/PhD programs (MD only too, I guess).</p>
<p>Much better than nothing. Maybe slightly worse than research in academia, not majorly so.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input. Just curious because I have a choice to make between this internship and another in a completely unrelated field that might be nice to explore and I’m not sure which I should pick. I’m only a freshman and I’ve been told it might be better to take the other one and figure out if it’s something I’m interested in ASAP, though working at one of Novartis’ research institutes in my hometown is very tempting …</p>
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<p>So how is research in academia viewed? I am thinking about doing some research in Health Economics next year, just to see how it is.</p>
<p>no it’ll look horrible</p>
<p><em>rollseyes</em></p>
<p>If I were you, I’d want to get at least SOME science research under my belt. Otherwise, health econ should be fine.</p>
<p>When I say academia, I just mean universities rather than industry. (Think-tanks are another set, I suppose.)</p>
<p>What sort of econ project are you thinking of?</p>
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<p>I guess I can do both next year, since my course load is going to be light. The health econ project hasn’t been finalized, but a professor who is in charge of health econ courses at my school, said that she doesn’t mind me getting involved in her project next year. I haven’t done any research in economics yet. This semester I just learned how to use stata, and I helped out in my advisor’s project. He just asked me to run a couple of regressions for him with the data sets he was using. I also helped out in collecting some data. The work I did this semester, doesn’t really “count” as research. I felt more like an assistant. Hopefully next year, I can get more involved in a health econ research project and hopefully do some independent work.</p>