Varied Research Interests

[MSTPtastic]

So, I've done a great deal of work in cancer immunotherapy (3 years in a lab, pubs, etc.), I know the field well, and in all likelihood I will most likely continue to work in that field for my thesis. However, I'm fairly indifferent to immunology or oncology as a specialty (though who knows - I haven't done much shadowing, and I might change my mind during rotations).

However, I also am discovering that I enjoy psychiatry quite a bit. More than one of my friends has dealt with mental illness, so I have a personal connection to the field. I've been volunteering on mental health unit, and I really enjoy the work. While I've never worked in a neuroscience lab, and I've never even taken an intro to neuroscience course, I would be interested in rotating in a cognitive neuroscience lab. If I like it, it might be a better direction for me than cancer immunotherapy.

My question is this: When schools ask me for my research interests, should I mention my interest in cognitive neuroscience, or just stick with cancer immunotherapy? I think that if a school happens to have a particularly strong cognitive neuroscience program, I should. But otherwise, should I focus on cancer? I understand that it's good to at least give the appearance of having a strong direction, and I'd probably be better at engaging interviewers with a cancer background.

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[Jeffrety]

Talk about all of your research experiences and really emphasize the CA immmunotherapy since that is a long-term project that resulted in a publication. The goal is to sound as accomplished as possible so you get admitted to a research-oriented school.

At this point, keep your options open. The kind of research you want to do is not really in line with what psychiatrists do. They investigate psychotropics while leaving the behavioral and cognitive work to psychology PhDs and PsyDs. Same thing for neuroscience. Neurologists are much more interested in CNS pathologies than normal structure and function (that's left to neuroscience PhDs).

 

[Electricity]

This is a fantastic question and is one of the things that hurt me on my interview trail. I suggest that you tell your interviewers that you want to do whatever it is that you are currently doing (in your case, cancer immunotherapy, and probably say something like you "don't know what specialty, but are considering something in internal medicine, like oncology", etc). Craft your application around whatever it is that you have the most experience in. This will help for two reasons:

1) It will help the adcom committees and your interviewers to "see" how you could blossom from your current state to that eventual state, easily. This helps because if you choose a more "out-there" plan (and you need a plan) that is unrelated to what you've already done, people will have a hard time visualizing that. Not everyone, but because the competition is so tough, and because of the conservative nature of most admissions processes, it's more important to just not lose points with anyone.

2) If you get grilled by anyone in your interviews with tough questions, it's helpful to have that topic actually be your strongest area of expertise so that you can respond to them. I was grilled on topics that I didn't know much about but said I speculatively might want to do, and it was brutal at times.

Once you are in school you can totally change what you do, and it is incredibly unlikely that anyone will care, or even know, what you said you wanted to do during your interview. No reason to even think about this right now (except for figuring out where you want to actually go to school, but that's often ancillary in the early stages).

Of course, I could be wrong (and you should take that into account as well, that this is just one data point), but in my personal experience, I wish I had heard this advice before I interviewed. I ended up in a great place, but I got lucky.

 

[MSTPtastic]

This is a fantastic question and is one of the things that hurt me on my interview trail. I suggest that you tell your interviewers that you want to do whatever it is that you are currently doing (in your case, cancer immunotherapy, and probably say something like you "don't know what specialty, but are considering something in internal medicine, like oncology", etc). Craft your application around whatever it is that you have the most experience in. This will help for two reasons:

1) It will help the adcom committees and your interviewers to "see" how you could blossom from your current state to that eventual state, easily. This helps because if you choose a more "out-there" plan (and you need a plan) that is unrelated to what you've already done, people will have a hard time visualizing that. Not everyone, but because the competition is so tough, and because of the conservative nature of most admissions processes, it's more important to just not lose points with anyone.

2) If you get grilled by anyone in your interviews with tough questions, it's helpful to have that topic actually be your strongest area of expertise so that you can respond to them. I was grilled on topics that I didn't know much about but said I speculatively might want to do, and it was brutal at times.

Once you are in school you can totally change what you do, and it is incredibly likely that anyone will care, or even know, what you said you wanted to do during your interview. No reason to even think about this right now (except for figuring out where you want to actually go to school, but that's often ancillary in the early stages).

Of course, I could be wrong (and you should take that into account as well, that this is just one data point), but in my personal experience, I wish I had heard this advice before I interviewed. I ended up in a great place, but I got lucky.

That was an excellent answer, thank you! I suspected as much, and I will follow your advice.

The school which brought up this concern for me was Stony Brook. They're affiliated with Cold Spring Harbor, which has a center devoted to cognitive neuroscience (with a specific focus on the molecular biology behind psychiatric disorders). This is unusual, since as you state Jeffrety most neurologists and psychiatrists do not do this sort of work. There are one or two PIs in that center, however, who I would be very interested in talking to (for example, one of these PIs is a psychiatrist who does large-scale genetic studies to identify novel genetic underpinnings of depression and other psychiatric disorders). I think I will mention this interest of mine to Stony Brook, since it is an unusual specialty of theirs. Otherwise, however, I will stick with cancer - it's my wheelhouse.

 

[gutonc]

Also, this is one of those things that makes applying from the MD/PhD side better than from the straight PhD side. When applying to grad school, you apply to a particular graduate program (Cell Bio, Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, whatever). When you come from the MD/PhD side, you get accepted by the school in general and can decide then which program you want to enter.

At least...that's how it was back in my day. But I'm old, so maybe they messed things up since then.

 

[M2inneedofhelp]

At this point, keep your options open. The kind of research you want to do is not really in line with what psychiatrists do. They investigate psychotropics while leaving the behavioral and cognitive work to psychology PhDs and PsyDs.

I would disagree with this statement. While it may be true that there is more of an emphasis in work on psychotropic meds in psychiatrist-researchers, I do know plenty of psychiatrist-researchers investigating behavioral and cognitive phenomena in psychiatric disorders without psychotropic medications (usually combined with neuroimaging and/or electrophysiological data).