T
TurtleGnome
Hello everyone! Been lurking for a couple of weeks. I can't get a straight answer out of the physician-scientists I've worked with, so thought I'd asked here.
I've always known I wanted a career as a scientific investigator. Academic research has been my ideal job for a long time now. But when I imagined my future, it always included some aspect of clinical and patient work.
Someone pushed me to consider a physician scientist career (which I didn't know existed), so I shadowed one, and have done a lot of thinking and agonizing before deciding that this is what I want to do with my life. I've more clinicals lined up.
As it stands, I've completed my second year of undergraduate. Double major: biology and chemistry. Very good GPA. I'm a good test taker so I'm not particularly worried about that aspect.
My research experience is what concerns me. I come from a small liberal arts college, and we don't have the funds (or facilities) to be carrying out biomedical research. I work as a research assistant to a professor of biology who I love. We do mostly ecological significance of invasive species. My speciality includes a particular keystone species and how a very common parasite effects their reproductive and predator avoidance capabilities. I've done this for two years now, and a manuscript I wrote has recently been accepted. It's a low impact journal for sure but I wrote it alone and I've learned a lot about the process.
The summer after freshman year, I worked as a research intern at Harvard Medical. Pretty famous PI. I learned a lot there and most of my time there was spent doing bioinformatics work/bench work for a particular project. We got a paper out of it, on which I am a co-author.
This summer I'm in New York at an REU funded program. Another relatively well known PI. Doing cancer stuff.
My overall question is this: Do you think I'm in good shape as of now, and should I try to shift my research I conduct at my school? I'm worried admissions committees will blow me off because they think I'm not interested in real biochem/cell/cancer research because I work in what is essentially behavioural ecology.
I've always known I wanted a career as a scientific investigator. Academic research has been my ideal job for a long time now. But when I imagined my future, it always included some aspect of clinical and patient work.
Someone pushed me to consider a physician scientist career (which I didn't know existed), so I shadowed one, and have done a lot of thinking and agonizing before deciding that this is what I want to do with my life. I've more clinicals lined up.
As it stands, I've completed my second year of undergraduate. Double major: biology and chemistry. Very good GPA. I'm a good test taker so I'm not particularly worried about that aspect.
My research experience is what concerns me. I come from a small liberal arts college, and we don't have the funds (or facilities) to be carrying out biomedical research. I work as a research assistant to a professor of biology who I love. We do mostly ecological significance of invasive species. My speciality includes a particular keystone species and how a very common parasite effects their reproductive and predator avoidance capabilities. I've done this for two years now, and a manuscript I wrote has recently been accepted. It's a low impact journal for sure but I wrote it alone and I've learned a lot about the process.
The summer after freshman year, I worked as a research intern at Harvard Medical. Pretty famous PI. I learned a lot there and most of my time there was spent doing bioinformatics work/bench work for a particular project. We got a paper out of it, on which I am a co-author.
This summer I'm in New York at an REU funded program. Another relatively well known PI. Doing cancer stuff.
My overall question is this: Do you think I'm in good shape as of now, and should I try to shift my research I conduct at my school? I'm worried admissions committees will blow me off because they think I'm not interested in real biochem/cell/cancer research because I work in what is essentially behavioural ecology.
