<p>Honestly, I really dont get what the advantage of research is for pre-med students. If you want to be a doctor shouldnt you be shadowing doctors, getting licensed for ambulance work, working in hospitals, or even working on the business/management or humanities side of things instead of spending your time doing cheap work for a professor? </p>
<p>Someone please explain this lunacy to me.</p>
<p>Research has much more relevance to being a physician than anything you’ll do as an EMT or hospital volunteer. Seriously, where do you think the evidence for how we practice medicine comes from? </p>
<p>If all you’re doing is coming into work and running PCR gels mindlessly, you are not getting the point. And it’s not your PI’s fault. If all you’re doing during hospital volunteering is stapling papers for 3 hours, then you’re not getting the point. It’s amazing how many premeds complain about menial work when they don’t any sort of effort to derive an educational experience from it.</p>
<p>Absolutely agree with norcalguy.</p>
<p>It’s not lunacy at all. Going into medicine is to enter into a lifetime of continual learning as you will always have to keep up with scientific developments in order to deliver the best treatments. The best way to gain a fundamental understanding of how science works and how and why we know what we do is to experience science firsthand. Medical school doesn’t mean memorizing a ton of information and never having to go back and amend what facts and procedures you were taught. As a premed you don’t necessarily have to end up doing research in your career but you need to understand the basis behind why you’re learning what you’re learning.</p>
<p>Thanks for the confirmation. It is helpful for my S because he has been invited to participate in research (10 hours/wk) starting as a freshman. We are trying to figure out which professors for him to talk to. Nonetheless, even though he has taken AP courses in calc, chem, and bio, he will have a hard time to understand the research in organic- or bio-chemistry. Is it too early for freshman to engage in research in those areas?</p>
<p>Not really, usually the research being done is so focused that even someone with a biochem degree will still have to read up on it. O chem related research might be tougher than biochem to actually have a creative hand in, but in either your son shouldn’t expect to be designing his own projects for a while even with significant effort on his part.</p>
<p>This thread reminds me of how people complain that physics isn’t relevant to medical school.</p>
<p>mmmcdowe,</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice. He will have to find out professors’ expectation and to see who wants to take a rookie.</p>
<p>D. loved research, if you do not like it, do not do it. However, most (all?) pre-meds do and have fun with it.</p>
<p>
As someone who is still potentially a pre-med, I will defer to the judgment of med students/docs on this, but I would initially challenge the notion that research is really more relevant to being a physician than doing clinical work. I did an honors research thesis as an undergrad (where I designed my own project, with the direction/input of my PI), and I’m currently working in a lab working on malaria vaccine. Getting that involved in research seems like a waste of time for someone whose ultimate goal is clinical practice (heck, I don’t even want a career in research. I’m just doing this temporarily).</p>
<p>Ultimately, I would say that research, while inherently necessary for the advancement of clinical practice, is so far removed from actual clinical practice that it’s almost irrelevant for a would-be doctor to get knee deep in research before going to med school. I absolutely think that pre-meds should get some legitimate research experience so they can understand the process, but I believe that only a cursory understanding is necessary. For docs mostly involved in clinical practice (as opposed to academic medicine and translational research), however, it seems like a complex understanding of the research process is unnecessary.</p>
<p>All the work I’m doing on malaria vaccine right now would be completely useless for a doctor to know. The doctor would have to know about interactions, side effects, administration, titers, dosage, etc. They wouldn’t have to know about the identity testing, the quality control, the details of which adjuvants are most effective, the outcomes of SEC-MALS analysis, etc.</p>
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<p>I don’t usually disagree with you GS, but I’m going to have to disagree with this statement.</p>
<p>As physicians, residents, and medical students, you must read a ton of research articles and you must be able to critique any research article you read. The conclusions and data of the article is moot if the research study was not done correctly. So, yes, understanding how the study was conducted and what statistical methods were used to analyze the data is a must. In fact, biostats at my medical school is stretched out over 4 years. And we meet quite frequently, as a formal part of the curriculum, to discuss articles. Many of these articles are good studies that were published in high level journals and, even at the medical student level, we are still asked to find flaws with the methods or analysis.</p>
<p>You MUST have an appreciation for how a study is designed, carried out, how data is analyzed, and the politics that goes on with publishing.</p>
<p>Fair enough, I guess I didn’t consider that.</p>
<p>GS’s original point was exactly the point which I was trying to say. Though I do see your point now norcalguy, but I still think that working as an EMT/shadowing is definitely considerably more valuable than being a lab rat.</p>
<p>That being said, there does need to be a balance. I continue to disagree that an extensive amount of research experience is necessary, but its important that every doctor gets a dip in the field to understand the dynamics. After all, i dont think you have to make research priority number 1, or even number 2 to understand those dynamics.</p>
<p>I dont know about you guys, but I would rather have someone who been seeing cases every spare moment of their time treat me than someone who’se just done rounds on side of their research. After all, you’re going to be treating people, not bacteria. </p>
<p>My goal in college is to do quality shadowing in all the subspecialities of medicine so that I can be better prepared to treat eye diseases, pediatrics, etc. because I’ve seen it all (hopefully by then I would have). I’ll probably want to do some hands on work with patients, rather than spending all my time with cells. </p>
<p>And in response to this quote: “If all you’re doing during hospital volunteering is stapling papers for 3 hours, then you’re not getting the point.”</p>
<p>I did that (stapled papers) for about a year before landing a shadowing job with one of the doctors at my hospital, and am now being given an opportunity to see patients and work one on one with the doctor by making those relationships, which is pretty uncommon esp for someone my age (its just me in the afternons, and a berkeley kid in the mornings). I’m learning so much from it, and I feel liek this is whats going to equip me to be a better doctor. Even if you move up from a PCR job, where does that get you? Most professors (that I know at least, from the community college I take evening classes in after my stupid highschool classes) have their own ideas for projects and such. Theres not much of a step up that I see past the initial one</p>
<p>EMT has nothing to do with being a physician so I don’t understand why that would be valuable.</p>
<p>Shadowing is good from a learning perspective. But it’s not mutually exclusive with research. Again, the point of research is not to learn how to run a PCR gel. The point of requiring physics is not so you can write the equation for momentum. It’s to get you in the right frame of mind for THINKING. Someone who has never done research before would never jump to pubmed when they have a question. They would go to their textbook. Right now, I never use textbooks and hardly ever use review books for reference. When I need an answer, I want evidence-based data that has a research study behind it. </p>
<p>You may never run a PCR again (although if you end up doing basic science research, you probably will). But, the point is that in a lab, you can see how research works and gain an appreciation for what it takes to discover something completely original that the world has never known before. As a college student, you shouldn’t do any hands-on work with patients. You aren’t qualified. Where you can benefit the lab is as a research assistant. </p>
<p>Research and being a good clinician are not mutually exclusive. Almost all attendings I have worked with do research. They are top notch attendings specifically because they do research and read papers all day long. They know the most recent and up to date evidence for the medicine they are practicing.</p>
<p>It’s okay if you enter medical school not knowing how to take a blood pressure or do a lumbar puncture. They will teach you in medical school. But, if you don’t know how to think critically (which you would learn in physics) or how to use pubmed or read research articles, there isn’t a lot of time in medical school that’s devoted to that. The strongest students on rotations are those who can rattle off studies off the top of their heads. Students who can only quote things from textbooks that we’ve known since the 1960’s won’t get very far.</p>
<p>Like I said, students who can’t see the point of taking physics for med school or doing research or taking an English course, really have no idea what it’s like to be a physician.</p>
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My D shadowed a cardiologist. His take on EMT training? It’s great for folks who want to be EMT’s. For someone who wants to be a doc? Not so much. </p>
<p>Grunt-work bottle washing lab jobs are probably of limited value, too, IMO. Lab jobs with some autonomy? Some project responsibility? Some opportunities for conferences, papers, and presentations? Very, very valuable at most med schools and almost required at some.</p>
<p>Hi awesomesauceness,</p>
<p>Just wanted to add my $0.02. First, I hope you realize the quality of advice you’ve received so far on this thread. You’ve had input from some veteran posters here who have impressive track records. Second, you’re still in high school. High school thinking does not equal college thinking. You could be a pretty good high school student if you just went to class and took notes and listened to your teachers. But you could be a way better high school student if you took the time to understand the material, make connections, ask questions, and get involved. As you’ve probably learned by now, there’s a lot more to learning than just knowing the facts.</p>
<p>College thinking does not equal medical school thinking. In much the same vein as the high school to college scenario I just described, you can be a good college student relatively easily. But in order to get to medical school (it’s so much more challenging than you can even comprehend as a high school student) you have to be the top of the top. And in order to get to the top of the top, you have to show that you are a top-notch thinker, that you consistently go above and beyond, and that you have a genuine interest in always challenging yourself to learn more and to learn new material.</p>
<p>A great way to do all of those things–to challenge, to think, to inquire, to solve–is to get involved with meaningful research. Norcalguy’s made the point already that it’s not about learning lab techniques. It’s about learning how to think. From a practical standpoint, it’s about how to organize and manage your time so you can effectively juggle running an 8hr invasion assay with three time points on the same day you have a 20min oral presentation for an honors humanities class and are volunteering to take an elderly neighbor to her afternoon doctor appointment.</p>
<p>You also might want to keep in mind that medical schools do not care about what you do in high school, with the possible exception that they might care about something you’ve been doing since high school. Shadowing every possible specialty around you right now, as a high schooler, is going to be meaningless in terms of your application to medical school. Will it provide you with some great exposure to health care? Of course it will–that’s exactly the point of it. But will it make you a more competitive applicant? The hours in and of themselves likely will not (but if you discover something about yourself in the process, or form a great relationship with a physician, then those things could provide some great starting points for secondaries).</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Thinking in medical school is only valued as long as it consists of thinking only what the attendings have insisted that you think. In my experience one can easily go through medical school without ever having a single original thought. In fact, it was my experience as both a medical student and a resident that there is nothing that attending physicians despise more than a medical student who expresses an original thought.</p>
<p>As a college student, I find a lot of premeds clamoring for research, a lot of them doing it just to “check off the list”. I understand where the original post is coming from. I met a lot of premed students who “do research” without caring for it. They just make a presentation and learn to say it, without really appreciating the science.</p>
<p>Then, there’s the problem of “fake research”. I know a few cases where students’ parents essentially arranged for others to come up with research plans and hand them over to their children, who then claim it as original work.</p>