<p>The easiest to get into are Research labs at your UG. That way you will be involved for several years and have opportunity to buid closer relationship. D’s boss nominated her (and others ) for Phi Beta Kappa and provided valuable great LOR’s. To get this internship, D. just sent one email and went thru very light informal interview where they most discussed D’s piano playing. Opportunity was great, subject of research was in area of D’s interest, she wrote proposal and received grants from 2 sources (experience that also was listed on her application later) and made presentation.<br>
At the same time, she did not get into summer program (college GPA=4.0) at the place where she used to work, had very positive references and records of employment. The problem is that connected kids are going to be in front of you. And in addition, it lasts only few months.</p>
<p>@UCbalumnus: Yes, I will keep that in mind. Thank you.</p>
<p>@Iwannabebrown: Thank you very much! So other non medical related extracurriculars are also useful to have in your app, correct? I assumed that med adcoms were mostly interested in reserach/volunteer and such. But thanks!</p>
<p>@MiamiDAP: Thank you SOO MUCH. Your posts have given me a lot of insight and a lot to think about and reconsider. I will make sure that I leave a lot of free time during Jr and Sr year then. Yea, I’m very scared about the competition. Does it help to apply for research positions as soon as possible?</p>
<p>@Mom2CollegeKids: Thanks so much for your input on this thread. </p>
<p>Thank you everyone for posting. I am definitely a lot more prepared and have more insight because of this.</p>
<p>yes, non-medical stuff is very useful. Many applications ask you to write about things like ethical dilemmas or times when you were in the minority, etc, none of these are going to be answered by shadowing or research. Also you aren’t in medical school yet, it’s ok to have interests outside of medicine. You definitely should shadow because you need to be able to express that you understand what a physician does, and watching every episode of scrubs/gray’s anatomy/house isn’t going to cut it as your evidence. Research again should only be done if you’re interested. If you’re not interested (although you should art least give it a shot during the summer or something, and also remember that research doesn’t necessarily mean in a laboratory with pipettes and petri dishes), you shouldn’t be applying to research oriented schools and non-research oriented schools won’t care that you didn’t do research.</p>