RESEARCH - clueless and confused

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
1

<p>I would appreciate it if the very knowledgable posters on this premed topics forum would fill us in on research - we really am clueless and confused. I did a search of the forum on research and read all the posts that came up, but still have questions.</p>

<li><p>Is having research experience on your medical school application absolutely essential?</p></li>
<li><p>If so, someone mentioned it could be ANY kind of research, including psychology, economics, etc. - is this correct? Are these “unusual” types of research done in conjunction with professors on your campus? All of the opportunities D has seen are in the lab setting.</p></li>
<li><p>Someone mentioned clinical research vs lab research. This is interesting. If you have a summer job in a busy medical office, could you formulate some type of “research” you would like to conduct under the guidance of one of the physicians in the practice and carry that out over the summer using the patients of the practice and write it up? Also if your “volunteering in a medical setting” is working in a rural health department, would some sort of clinical research in that setting be appropriate? If so, I guess you would get with the research office at your school for their help in setting this up?</p></li>
<li><p>Starting research after your sophomore year is acceptable. Is there a number of hours or a length of time that is standard? Or, are schools just looking at the fact that you participated in some type of research.</p></li>
<li><p>How important is publishing and how attainable is that for undergrads?</p></li>
<li><p>In my search, someone mentioned on one of the threads coming up with your own topic/hypothesis and researching that. You would then write a paper and do what with it? Work with a professor and try to get it published? This is also an intriguing idea but I don’t understand how it would work.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>I write and ask for your help following a call just a few minutes ago from my D. She is a rising sophomore and just met with the “research opportunities office” at her school. She told me that she really isn’t interested in working in a lab “pouring this chemical in that tube” just to put it on her medical school application. Everything she does in her life she does with a passion and a purpose, and I guess she sees no purpose (and certainly sees no passion) in “going through the motions” in a lab. Her college is very academically rigorous and with taking orgo and bio this year, she really doesn’t feel like she can afford the 8-10 hours a week required away from studying. She spent all of last summer working in a medical office. She spent half of this summer working in a medical office in the mornings and volunteering in a rural health department in the afternoons. The 2nd half of this summer she spent at an intensive language program becoming fluent in a 2nd language. She has raised thousands of dollars selling her original watercolor paintings for a national group that raises awareness for a medical condition. She was asked by this group to paint two watercolors that they had made into holiday greeting cards - the group sold several thousand of the cards nationally. She was asked by this group and did lobby for them in Wash D.C. She plays a musical instrument in two groups on campus and plays a sport at the club level. This research “requirement” is just a stumbling block. Any advise or recommendations you have would be greatly appreciated!</p>

2

<p>1.) Only if you're applying to a research-heavy medical school.</p>

<p>2.) This is something that I'm really not sure of; I don't think there's a good answer. I have been told directly by the director of admissions at a top-20 school that the kind of research doesn't matter -- they're only interested in the intellectual pursuit. While I am absolutely sure that she is right for her school, I'm not convinced that this is necessarily the case everywhere. Medical schools engage themselves in basic science and clinical research, and it might be hard to explain the significance of a research paper on Renaissance Art, for example, to an 80 year old general surgeon. Bottom line: I don't know, and I don't think anybody really does.</p>

<p>3.) Research is surprisingly difficult to set up on your own -- lots of paperwork, institutional type ethics boards, etc. I've seen a couple small practices do it, but it's very rare in that context. It's much more promising to sign on with an existing project -- starting your own is really very difficult without institutional support.</p>

<p>4.) Most important thing is to gain something from the experience. Significant time matters -- the threshold is really up to the student involved, though. At least a summer full-time or a school year part-time, though.</p>

<p>5.) It's very random for undergrads. It's rare enough that it's not required and common enough that it's not a guarantee -- so, in other words, it's a nice feather in your cap but doesn't alter your chances hugely.</p>

<p>6.) Yeah, I don't know how you'd do this, either.</p>

3

<p>
[quote]
In my search, someone mentioned on one of the threads coming up with your own topic/hypothesis and researching that.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The person that you mentioned might have been me. I did say something like that on another thread, but there may have been other threads written by other people that you may have read. </p>

<p>
[quote]
You would then write a paper and do what with it? Work with a professor and try to get it published? This is also an intriguing idea but I don't understand how it would work.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>If you wrote it all by yourself, then the best thing for you to do at that point is to simply try to publish it yourself. That is, you find a scientific journal that you think may be interested in your paper and then you revise it to conform to whatever procedures the journal has (i.e. following length and format guidelines) and then submit it using whatever procedure they have. Often times these days, the submission process is handled completely online. Then you wait to see what happens. You might get accepted, you might get rejected (which is very common for the most prestigious journals), or you might get a revise & resubmit (R&R) which is basically like a conditional accept - meaning they are very likely to accept it once you make certain revisions and/or satisfy certain questions that the referee had that your paper did not address. If you got a reject, then what people usually do is then submit it to a lower prestige journal. {Note, you generally can't have the same paper being considered by multiple journals at the same time, so you have to wait for one rejection before you can try another journal.} </p>

<p>Regarding working with profs once you already have the paper written, you can certainly use them for advice, particularly on how to improve your paper, on which journal you think might be appropriate for your paper, or other issues that will increase your publication chances. Now, granted, at some point, the prof will be helping you so much to edit the paper that he effectively becomes a co-author, and the demarcation line is fuzzy as to when that occurs. But certainly if the research question is yours, and you did the vast majority of the data analysis and the writing of the paper, then you are perfectly within your rights to claim sole authorship. </p>

<p>
[quote]
She told me that she really isn't interested in working in a lab "pouring this chemical in that tube" just to put it on her medical school application. Everything she does in her life she does with a passion and a purpose, and I guess she sees no purpose (and certainly sees no passion) in "going through the motions" in a lab.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Here's one of my favorite examples. I knew a guy who, while still a student, decided to research the social networks of rappers. That's right - rappers. Specifically, he analyzed lyrics of rappers, using free online lyrics databases like the Original Hip-Hop Lyric Archive (The</a> Original Hip-Hop (Rap) Lyrics Archive Version 2.0 (Beta)) to see which rappers collaborated with each other, in order to find out who is the most 'socially connected' rappers in the world, and find that Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, and 2Pac were among the most connected individual rappers, and the Wu Tang Clan were a highly connected rap group. He got it published as sole author in the *Journal of Statistical Mechanics<a href="Smith,%202006">/i</a>. Heck, it's even got 3 citations now, which is pretty darn good for a 2-year-old paper that was sole-authored by a student (as plenty of scientific papers written by actual professors never get cited even once even after being published for years) .</p>

<p>[physics/0511215</a>] The Network of Collaboration Among Rappers and its Community Structure</p>

<p>Yet if you look at his paper's methodology, it's really not that hard. (His unique contribution was in coming up with a good research question, but his methodology is quite straightforward). The raw data was freely available at the ohhla.com and other online rap lyrics databases. He just needed to learn how to use 2 freeware software tools: one to clean the data (i.e. to correct misspellings of names of rappers), and the other to actually generate the social network graph. I think anybody who is dedicated could learn how to use these software tools in a couple of months. </p>

<p>The moral of the story is that there are lots of things you can research. You are certainly not confined to working in a lab, pouring chemicals out of test-tubes. Granted, if you're going to be a doctor, your research probably should have something to do with health care. But health care is a very broad field. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Research is surprisingly difficult to set up on your own -- lots of paperwork, institutional type ethics boards, etc. I've seen a couple small practices do it, but it's very rare in that context. It's much more promising to sign on with an existing project -- starting your own is really very difficult without institutional support.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>See above. I agree that some types of research are indeed very difficult to set up, i.e. those that require extensive lab resources, or that require observing human subjects (i.e. psychology experiments). </p>

<p>On the other hand, I am convinced that a lot of research can be done with existing databases. The trick, then, is to find a good dataset, or if necessary creating your own. But once you have a dataset, you can apply all kinds of analytical tools to it to extract useful information. You won't need the permission of anybody if the data is in the public domain, and you can use freeware analytical tools (of which there are many). </p>

<p>Granted, I'm no expert when it comes to health-care related datasets, but I strongly suspect that a lot of data can be found at various government health-care institutions (i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, and their state counterparts). That's one place you could start.</p>

4

<p>research should be done after sophomore year? I was planning on doing it in the summer BEFORE my sophomore year. is this a bad idea?</p>

5

<p>No, that's fine too.</p>