I have an engineering background and did a co-op at a major pharma company in the research and development organization. My work included conducting a literature review of best practices supporting the pharmaceutical industry and compiling future recommendations for improvement. Would this count as research in my W/A?
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Does this count as research?
Started by irishforever182
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No.
No.
Employment
You did a co-op/internship. That's how it should be classified (employment).
Seems like this was unpaid? If so, then was it a competitive internship--if yes, then I would list this as Honors/Awards/Recognition. If not competitive, then "research" or "other" is probably the best categorization, even though I don't really consider a lit review to be research. Research really means coming up with a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis through experimentation. This internship is still kind of cool, but it would be stronger if you had something else that is more typical hypothesis-driven research, in which case this experience is complementary and could show you how your wet lab experience can matter in the real world.
If you were in fact paid, then paid employment, and you can decide whether or not to call it medical/clinical or not. Clearly not clinical, but I'd be hard pressed to say it isn't medical.
As I said, you could decide whether to categorize as medical or not. But it isn’t clinical
I would not call it medical/clinical. The manufacturing side of pharma is controlled by the FDA but so is the manufacturing of candy and shampoo (I had a brother-in-law involved in the programming of factory equipment in all three industries, I would not have called his work medical/clinical by any stretch).
Research must involve testing a hypothesis and directly working with a team to solve a problem that has not been discovered by the scientific community. Literature reviews are important, but are usually involved as a requisite component of doing hypothesis based research. Since your experience was a co-op internship, and did not include direct hypothesis-based research, then it would not count as a research activity in the eyes of an admissions committee.
This matters because it means if you do not have other research experiences, you should consider pursuing them prior to submitting an AMCAS application.
This matters because it means if you do not have other research experiences, you should consider pursuing them prior to submitting an AMCAS application.
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