How do you know what residencies require research?

[medgrlsox21]

So I don't want to be a GP, but I'm starting to notice a lot of research type stuff for medical students but when do people have time to do that other than the summer between first and second year? And why would anyone dedicate their last summer ever to research if they weren't 100% they wanted to go in that field? So my question is this does anyone know what residency(s) require research? I've heard plastics does but other than that its seems to be a mess. Help please!

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[JPmamd09]

http://www.nrmp.org/data/chartingoutcomes2007.pdf

This might be a good jumping off point for you. It's a fairly comprehensive guide for each specialty regarding avg board scores, AOA membership, and, to help answer your question, research experiences and publications for people who matched in the individual specialties. This data is a couple years old, but it can still give you a sense of how necessary research is in some of the specialties. In my experience, the more competitive the specialty, the more likely most candidates will have done some kind of research in med school. Examples include plastics (as you said), derm, rad onc, ortho. However, research certainly won't hurt your application (unless of course you totally screwed up or were a jackass to your preceptor or something).

My advice (take it with a grain of salt) would be to do it. If you find you don't like it then you'll know it's not something you'll want as a part of your career. At the very least you'll have made some connections, possibly garnered a LOR, and have something productive you've done during the summer. Plus if you ultimately opt for a very competitive specialty you've got at least one research experience going for you. I really wish I'd done some during my rising M2 summer. Hope that's helpful, best of luck to you!

 

[MediumDef]

...And why would anyone dedicate their last summer ever to research if they weren't 100% they wanted to go in that field? So my question is this does anyone know what residency(s) require research? I've heard plastics does but other than that its seems to be a mess. Help please!

Even if you don't know what field you want to go into academic institutions like to see that you have some interest and ability to critically analyze data, formulate and test a hypothesis (how much spending a summer entering #'s into a CPU demonstrates said ability is debatable but that's another story).

People will say that if you want to do plastics only plastics research(or to a lesser extent surgical research) is important but I think that has more to do with the connections you make and the person evaluating your residency application being at least tangentially interested in what you did as opposed to seeing that you did some psych research and immediately their eyes glaze over in boredom.