Clinical Research Skills?

[Skeime]

Hi everyone:

I'm starting M1 this fall, and I'm interested in doing some clinical research, especially given the increasing importance of research on successful residency matching. However, I've never done any clinical research and I'm wondering if there are any useful basic skills that I can start building now that will make my life easier down the line when I start research. Specifically, I'm wondering if skills such as excel, statistics, and knowledge of data analysis (using programs like R or Python) are things that PIs will expect a medical student to be familiar with.

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[ndafife]

Can you look up basic info in a chart and copy it into a spreadsheet efficiently and correctly. Thats about all the baseline skill you need.

 

[raiderette]

Excel might be useful, but don't pay for a class. Watch a video or two.

 

[Oso]

You'll develop the basic skills when you need to.

Definitely do NOT recommend spending time on this right now, your last few moments of freedom before school starts.

 

[glip-glop]

Echo the above to relax but if you feel inclined to do something, then learning R basics might be handy if you can jump on a retrospective study early in M1. Was pretty annoying teaching myself using youtube during busy class/rotation schedule

 

[wholeheartedly]

there are great free online courses on R that could be useful, and Hopkins has free Epi and public health courses available online.

But your first priority is your med school classes.

 

[Gurby]

I had no research experience at all coming in, and have had a very productive M1 year. Just start shadowing early, show interest in research, get involved with a PI who publishes a lot of papers and knows what medical students want out of a research experience (ie opportunity to write / get name on papers, poster presentations, etc).

The lab I'm working in has dedicated data people so while those skills would never be a bad thing, I wouldn't spend much time using them even if I had them.

 

[Frogger27]

If you can learn SPSS or R it would be super helpful.... You will have the opportunity to get your name on a lot of papers if you join a productive research group and become the "stats" guy. Besides that, nothing really you could do to prepare yourself though.

 

[Skeime]

Thanks for the responses everyone, I greatly appreciate it!

 

[SunsFun]

If you can learn SPSS or R it would be super helpful.... You will have the opportunity to get your name on a lot of papers if you join a productive research group and become the "stats" guy. Besides that, nothing really you could do to prepare yourself though.

STATA or SAS are other options. If you look hard enough there are plenty of tutorials and other free resources to learn those programs. The learning curve is quite steep but it will definitely pay off.