What does it mean to "know your field" this early on?

[Long Pan Lau]

There's a lot of advice for MD/PhD interviews, and one that's been repeated is, "Know your field of research." To what extent should you know your field of research? I know it's hard to say exactly what, since it's obviously highly dependent on the field. However, does "knowing your field of research" mean knowing EVERYTHING? Some examples would help!

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[Fluorescentboy]

Knowing how your work fits into the bigger picture, especially the clinical implications if any. But really just understanding why the work you are doing is important and how that fits into the larger body of science, and also other work that other labs are doing.

I have 5-6 groups that I keep track of (pubcrawler helps) that I know when they come out with a paper it will be significant for what our group was doing. Basically just being able to "talk shop" with others in related research areas, and knowing why the work your lab is doing is exciting.

You don't have to know everything but, for example, if you can't explain why the x receptor your lab works on is interesting or why you guys are working with it then you need to "know your field" more.

 

[freelancePsychic]

It doesn't mean 'know all of cancer biology' its more like having an idea of what groups that ask similar questions are doing.

A shortcut to learning the field for interviews is to look at the introduction to a few of the papers your lab has put out. They'll cite the major studies and the new cool stuff. If you read a few of these you'll have the shape of your field.

 

[Fencer]

An example of having a perspective in Cancer Biology is having read "The Emperor of All Maladies" book by Siddhartha Mukherjee...

 

[Ludwig2000]

In addition to the good advice above, whatever particular methods you use in your current research (PCR, sequencing, etc) you might just want to make sure you truly understand, I.e. practice explaining the mechanism before interviews. Was embarrassed myself when at one point I had to admit that I just ran an analysis program without really knowing what it was doing. And I’ve since known an interviewer here to ask “so how does PCR actually work?”