<p>Freshman in college here, with sophomore standing. I want to go to medical school after I graduate, so I will probably need letters of recommendations. Seeing as how I'm pretty much a sophomore, should I get involved with research opportunities that professors may have? </p>
<p>Also, is collaborating with professors for research a necessity to receiving good recommendation letters?</p>
<p>It can be, but it’s not required. It does make the process of getting to know professors faster, though.</p>
<p>If you want a recommendation letter make the professor like you.</p>
<p>A good recommendation is going to come from a professor who knows you and can speak of the work you do. Doing research with a professor can be an advantage (besides the experience) and yield a better letter since it will be more than “Johnny did very well in class and works hard blah blah blah”.</p>
<p>You may want to visit the Med School board and see what they think.</p>
<p>Either way, it’s pretty early to start thinking about this, no matter what your standing, you’re still a freshman. Even a sophomore at this point might not be much more use in the lab than cleaning glassware.</p>
<p>Enjoy freshman year, study, get good grades.</p>
<p>If you mean sophomore by way of AP credit, hold off on starting research for at least first semester. In my experience, unless you already have previous solid research experience from high school, most PIs don’t want you until you’ve at least finished the gen chem series with lab. You are currently useless beyond washing glassware, and med schools do take note of whether or not you actually worked on a project and can explain it well. </p>
<p>If you have previous experience or you are a sophomore by way of taking a year of community college, still hold off for at least a semester. Let yourself adjust to university level studying first. You have two more years even if you plan to graduate early. You don’t need to conduct research with your professors in order to get good letters from them, but having a good relationship with them might help you get research positions. To build a relationship, do well in the course, participate in class, and attend office hours. If you have a pretty big class, the prof still might not remember you, so do the same at discussion. One of my TAs wrote me a letter when I was applying for a job and had it cosigned by the prof. The TA said he’d be glad to do the same for me when I was applying for grad school.</p>
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<p>Yes. Do research as soon as possible. A lot of people do these things over the summer so they don’t have to bother with it during the year.</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone who responded; your comments were what I was looking for.</p>
<p>A lot of you said something along the lines of getting the professor to know/like you. Aside from research with a professor, how exactly would I go about doing this? I’m in classes where there are 50-80+ students, and aside from personally asking the professor for help on a homework problem/test corrections/etc., I’m unsure of how I would achieve the goal of having my professors know me well enough for a good recommendation letter.</p>
<p>That’s why you get them in your last year of college generally…when you might have had a couple classes with the same professor, or had smaller classes. You don’t get them from intro classes.
I was incredibly nervous about getting my letters throughout college…never knew who to ask, etc. By the time I needed them at end of junior year, I knew just who to ask and everything went perfectly…just got into my master’s program. So relax, don’t worry about that stuff for another couple years. For now just focus on doing well in class and getting good study habits.</p>
<p>Also, you really aren’t “pretty much a sophomore”.</p>
<p>Yea, the whole “pretty much a sophomore” thing isn’t really true. If you’re pre-med, then advanced standing due to AP credit really doesn’t mean anything (in other words, you’ll still take 4 years to graduate). </p>
<p>IMO, wait to take the intro biology courses so that you can get more out of a research position. No point in joining a lab if you don’t even understand what they’re studying. Also, you’ll learn about some common lab techniques in the intro bio classes, so you’ll actually understand what they’re doing in the lab. And I think that taking a few bio classes helped me identify my interests first and then look for a lab that I’m interested in. Oh and its probably also good to establish a good GPA first before you get all crazy with the extracurriculars.</p>