How much research is enough?

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Shovo

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Would a summers worth (3 months) of research be enough for an applicant to have a GOOD shot of getting into medical school?

Assuming that I am able to maintain a GPA > 3.8, and achieve a MCAT score in the 80th percentile or better, would having only a summers worth of research decrease my chances of getting into medical school?

Also, the research is not likely to yield me and publications/poster since I will only be doing it over the summer. I can continue to do research in the Fall, but I plan to work as a CNA instead.

I will also be in a leadership position in three different organizations (2 were founded by me).

So essentially, I would like to know if it is "ok" to drop research if everything else is in check.

Thanks!
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You need to be able to speak knowledgeably about hypothesis-driven research and describe your role in the process.
How are hypotheses developed?
What kinds of studies can be designed to support or refute the hypothesis?
How are results analyzed?
What are the clinical implications of the possible outcomes...
 
what?




and no, it's not enough
 
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doc05 said:
what?




and no, it's not enough
Click to expand...

I don't see why it wouldn't be? Unless he is trying to get into a top 20 and/or research heavy school I don't see having this amount of research being something that would cause him not to get accepted somewhere. More research is always better but it isn't necessary for you in my opinion. Many applicants don't have any research experiences at all and still get into med school.

On top of all that you seem to be doing the right things overall in regard to extracurriculars.
 
If you are doing research just o do it as something to check off a checklist if its not obvious reading your application it'll be blatantly obvious during any interview.
 
GrapesofRath said:
If you are doing research just o do it as something to check off a checklist if its not obvious reading your application it'll be blatantly obvious during any interview.
Click to expand...

Lol. This process is nothing but a checklist:

  • 3.8+ GPA ✓
  • 80th+ percentile MCAT score ✓
  • 50+ shadowing hours ✓
  • 100-150+ clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • 100+ non-clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • Understanding of research and how it applies to medicine ✓
    • Generally accomplished by conducting your own experiment
  • Show you're a leader (be President of the "all-important pre-med club) ✓
  • Have at least one activity that can grab the admissions committee's attention ✓

Plenty of students before OP have done meaningless, uninteresting research only to display their enthusiasm during an interview.

Not trying to say you're completely wrong, because I think putting yourself in activities you will enjoy is the best way to go about the process. However, we've all had to do a few things we didn't want to in order to get to the cusp of medical school. And I'm sure we've all described those activities in our application in a way that made it seem like a great learning and interesting experience.

To OP: Three months will be more than enough if you have a favorable, public in-state school. At my in-state school, for instance, only 68% of accepted applicants have been apart of research. If you want to compete for a top 20 or favorable private school, you'll need a bit more.
 
You can't assume, you'll either achieve it or you won't. Come back when you're ready to submit your applications.

All the ECs in the world won't save you if your cGPA falls below 3.5 or if you bomb the MCAT.
 
HCHopeful said:
Lol. This process is nothing but a checklist:

  • 3.8+ GPA ✓
  • 80th+ percentile MCAT score ✓
  • 50+ shadowing hours ✓
  • 100-150+ clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • 100+ non-clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • Understanding of research and how it applies to medicine ✓
    • Generally accomplished by conducting your own experiment
  • Show you're a leader (be President of the "all-important pre-med club) ✓
  • Have at least one activity that can grab the admissions committee's attention ✓

Plenty of students before OP have done meaningless, uninteresting research only to display their enthusiasm during an interview.

Not trying to say you're completely wrong, because I think putting yourself in activities you will enjoy is the best way to go about the process. However, we've all had to do a few things we didn't want to in order to get to the cusp of medical school. And I'm sure we've all described those activities in our application in a way that made it seem like a great learning and interesting experience.

To OP: Three months will be more than enough if you have a favorable, public in-state school. At my in-state school, for instance, only 68% of accepted applicants have been apart of research. If you want to compete for a top 20 or favorable private school, you'll need a bit more.
Click to expand...

I honestly don't find research enjoyable, granted I haven't don't much. If I am able to describe the theory behind my research and its implications to medicine, would that be satisfactory?

Or do adcoms want to see something concrete such as a publication/poster?

I don't plan on applying to any top 20 schools either, and I will most likely be attending a medical school in-state (Florida), assuming that I get in.
 
Shovo said:
I honestly don't find research enjoyable, granted I haven't don't much. If I am able to describe the theory behind my research and its implications to medicine, would that be satisfactory?

Or do adcoms want to see something concrete such as a publication/poster?

I don't plan on applying to any top 20 schools either, and I will most likely be attending a medical school in-state (Florida), assuming that I get in.
Click to expand...
Understanding the research you participated in will be fine.
Nobody remotely expects a publication in your situation.
 
HCHopeful said:
Lol. This process is nothing but a checklist:

  • 3.8+ GPA ✓
  • 80th+ percentile MCAT score ✓
  • 50+ shadowing hours ✓
  • 100-150+ clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • 100+ non-clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • Understanding of research and how it applies to medicine ✓
    • Generally accomplished by conducting your own experiment
  • Show you're a leader (be President of the "all-important pre-med club) ✓
  • Have at least one activity that can grab the admissions committee's attention ✓
Click to expand...


nice checklist
 
Lucca's guide to deciding how much research experience you need to understand the scientific method (i.e. impress medical school adcoms):
  1. Purchase a book with "Quantum" or "Healing" in the title that is not a textbook.
  2. Read it.
  3. Are you convinced by it? If yes -----> do more research. If no -----> continue

But actually what the others said.
 
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You decide that. If research is something you find interesting, there shouldn't ever be an "enough". On the flip side, once you've done some research and figured out that it's not for you, then finish out the project and then leave and find something else that you enjoy doing.
 
Shovo said:
I honestly don't find research enjoyable, granted I haven't don't much. If I am able to describe the theory behind my research and its implications to medicine, would that be satisfactory?

Or do adcoms want to see something concrete such as a publication/poster?

I don't plan on applying to any top 20 schools either, and I will most likely be attending a medical school in-state (Florida), assuming that I get in.
Click to expand...

If you don't find research enjoyable, why the hell are you doing it in the first place? There are more productive ways to spend your time.
 
research is a calling like medicine. You shouldn't have to do it unless you want to and only those passionate enough to pursue its true nature will think that no amount of research will be enough research. For example, despite having 4 years of research in undergraduate, I still want to pursue research afterwards because I just think I haven't had enough exposure still so far. That may seem weird but it's true. Compare that with your 3 months stint and I would probably say that no, you really haven't even hit the tip of the finger yet with this one. One summer can mean spending all your time troubleshooting a specific procedure. Commanding change requires years of dedicated hardship or luck that places you in the right research at the right time.
 
Carmiche said:
I don't see why it wouldn't be? Unless he is trying to get into a top 20 and/or research heavy school I don't see having this amount of research being something that would cause him not to get accepted somewhere. More research is always better but it isn't necessary for you in my opinion. Many applicants don't have any research experiences at all and still get into med school.

On top of all that you seem to be doing the right things overall in regard to extracurriculars.
Click to expand...


the OP is doing nothing more than filling in a checklist. which is the wrong approach.
also, sounds like the OP is very early in the process, and has made way too many assumptions.

perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but the OP's first post essentially reads "what's the bare minimum I can do to get into medical school?"

If you're interested in research, do it right, and that means your entire undergrad career, not just one summer. If you're not.... don't do any, and immerse yourself in something you actually like.
 
doc05 said:
the OP is doing nothing more than filling in a checklist. which is the wrong approach.
also, sounds like the OP is very early in the process, and has made way too many assumptions.

perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but the OP's first post essentially reads "what's the bare minimum I can do to get into medical school?"

If you're interested in research, do it right, and that means your entire undergrad career, not just one summer. If you're not.... don't do any, and immerse yourself in something you actually like.
Click to expand...
This whole process is a checklist. No one will convince me otherwise.
 
HCHopeful said:
Lol. This process is nothing but a checklist:

  • 3.8+ GPA ✓
  • 80th+ percentile MCAT score ✓
  • 50+ shadowing hours ✓
  • 100-150+ clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • 100+ non-clinical volunteering hours ✓
  • Understanding of research and how it applies to medicine ✓
    • Generally accomplished by conducting your own experiment
  • Show you're a leader (be President of the "all-important pre-med club) ✓
  • Have at least one activity that can grab the admissions committee's attention ✓

Plenty of students before OP have done meaningless, uninteresting research only to display their enthusiasm during an interview.

Not trying to say you're completely wrong, because I think putting yourself in activities you will enjoy is the best way to go about the process. However, we've all had to do a few things we didn't want to in order to get to the cusp of medical school. And I'm sure we've all described those activities in our application in a way that made it seem like a great learning and interesting experience.

To OP: Three months will be more than enough if you have a favorable, public in-state school. At my in-state school, for instance, only 68% of accepted applicants have been apart of research. If you want to compete for a top 20 or favorable private school, you'll need a bit more.
Click to expand...

Just wondering, but how often do adcoms meet an applicant who impresses with his/her knowledge of research? Aka can research be that "one activity that can grab the admissions committee's attention" and typically how much prepares the applicant to impress?
 
Last edited:
This is an amorphous issue with a lot of different answers. For top schools, for instance, you may have a tougher time because the competitive applicants for those schools tend to have more research experience. What medical schools really want to see from research is that you learned how to form hypotheses and test them. You should understand what the hypothesis of your research project(s) was and be able to describe your role in the research. Know how the experimental methods tested the hypothesis and what ended up happening (if you were around for the completion of the project).
 
Shirafune said:
Just wondering, but how often do adcoms meet an applicant who impresses with his/her knowledge of research? Aka can research be that "one activity that can grab the admissions committee's attention" and typically how much prepares the applicant to impress?
Click to expand...

It most certainly can be the activity that grabs the attention of the committee, but you'd most likely need a 1st author pub in a decent journal. To be a truly transcendent research experience, a 1st author pub in Science would do nicely.

I think a committee would be impressed with any 1st author, and potentially a 2nd-3rd if the applicant portrays the experience correctly.

The problem is most applicants with research were either cleaning vials or editing the paper. And the ones who did conduct an experiment, well... more often than not that project was probably very elementary. In the end, research is another way to gain experience in science and see the "other side" that potential med students often don't look into.

I will have over 1000 hours of research experience with two future middle author papers, and I don't consider my experience to be anything unique.
 
HCHopeful said:
It most certainly can be the activity that grabs the attention of the committee, but you'd most likely need a 1st author pub in a decent journal. To be a truly transcendent research experience, a 1st author pub in Science would do nicely.

I think a committee would be impressed with any 1st author, and potentially a 2nd-3rd if the applicant portrays the experience correctly.

The problem is most applicants with research were either cleaning vials or editing the paper. And the ones who did conduct an experiment, well... more often than not that project was probably very elementary. In the end, research is another way to gain experience in science and see the "other side" that potential med students often don't look into.
Click to expand...

I highly doubt that a 1st author publication is required to impress an admissions committee. I think any sort of publication would impress an admissions committee as long as you can articulate your role in the research and why it was important. Whether you're first, second, third, etc. author is less relevant unless you got authorship by simply editing the manuscript or cleaning glassware. You can have second authors who did nothing but the grunt work in the lab and have very little knowledge of how the main hypothesis of the paper came to be or why he/she was doing certain experiments. If you're a fourth author who can articulate why you did certain experiments and how you tested your hypotheses, that will impress just about anybody. Of course, the best would be a first author pub and being able to take responsibility over the project but people, especially in academia, know that authorship can be largely a political issue.

I also highly doubt any traditional applicant or any applicant who has taken less than two gap years will have a first-author Science pub. These are a very select few. There may be applicants with first-author papers in lower impact journals but even if the undergrad did most of the work on the project, a grad student or post-doc will take first authorship if the publication is in such a prestigious journal. It's just lab politics. I have yet to see a lab who would give an undergrad seniority in such a prestigious journal - unless the undergrad completely designed the experiment him/herself and designing work that is Science or Nature-worthy is difficult even for a grad student. Such endeavors are only successfully undertaken by the cream of the crop and therefore are diminishingly small in number.
 
chemist16 said:
I highly doubt that a 1st author publication is required to impress an admissions committee. I think any sort of publication would impress an admissions committee as long as you can articulate your role in the research and why it was important. Whether you're first, second, third, etc. author is less relevant unless you got authorship by simply editing the manuscript or cleaning glassware. You can have second authors who did nothing but the grunt work in the lab and have very little knowledge of how the main hypothesis of the paper came to be or why he/she was doing certain experiments. If you're a fourth author who can articulate why you did certain experiments and how you tested your hypotheses, that will impress just about anybody. Of course, the best would be a first author pub and being able to take responsibility over the project but people, especially in academia, know that authorship can be largely a political issue.

I also highly doubt any traditional applicant or any applicant who has taken less than two gap years will have a first-author Science pub. These are a very select few. There may be applicants with first-author papers in lower impact journals but even if the undergrad did most of the work on the project, a grad student or post-doc will take first authorship if the publication is in such a prestigious journal. It's just lab politics. I have yet to see a lab who would give an undergrad seniority in such a prestigious journal - unless the undergrad completely designed the experiment him/herself and designing work that is Science or Nature-worthy is difficult even for a grad student. Such endeavors are only successfully undertaken by the cream of the crop and therefore are diminishingly small in number.
Click to expand...

That's the point. That Science pub would be crazy impressive.

I guess, to me, adcoms wouldn't be impressed by simply knowing what the research you've done actually means. That's to be expected. It seems like a low expectation.

I think adcoms are rarely "impressed," which is why I set the bar so high.
 
HCHopeful said:
That's the point. That Science pub would be crazy impressive.

I guess, to me, adcoms wouldn't be impressed by simply knowing what the research you've done actually means. That's to be expected. It seems like a low expectation.

I think adcoms are rarely "impressed," which is why I set the bar so high.
Click to expand...

To be fair, it is very rare that I find an undergraduate researcher who can do more than just describe their work. They can describe the project and the big picture just fie but when you delve into the nitty gritty it is very obvious when a project has had zero creative involvement from that undergrad. Why this experiment? Why not this? How do you know this? How can you prove his assumption? Why is this a good hypothesis? How are you confident in this when that? I got grilled by like 5 PhDs on a national scholarship board and even I, as a prospective Md/PhD who likes to think they know what they have been doing in lab for the past year, was dumbfounded by several of their questions that were just far ahead of what I had ever considered. It was an extremely humbling experience but even they didn't expect me to know everything perfectly. I didn't get the scholarship so obviously someone did lol.

I'm just saying, it is not unreasonable to be impressed by an undergrad who at the very least knows why they do which experiments regardless of project description. Undergrads are remarkably dispassionate and remember that the general population adcoms see is not SDN!
 
It's sad that you guys see it as a checklist. The reason adcoms want to see a lot of interesting things on a resume is that they want people who do things that they care about and will continue to do during their career. Schools that are big on research want to train researchers, not some kid who washed dishes for a summer to write something down on their resume. This is too mature of a thought process which is why premeds are obsessed over the idea of a checklist. The funny thing is that medical school is busy and a lot of students would rather spend their free time hanging out, not slaving away in a lab.

Activities aren't supposed to be measured in hours but in experience. It's very difficult to quantify value but very easy to look at hours. Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of boring cookie cutters who do the same things for no good reason and gained no benefit from them
 
If your goal is to just get into a medical school, any medical school, then you may not even need any. Don't do it just to check a box. Do some other EC that is meaningful. Personally, I didn't do any research in undergrad.
 
HCHopeful said:
That's the point. That Science pub would be crazy impressive.

I guess, to me, adcoms wouldn't be impressed by simply knowing what the research you've done actually means. That's to be expected. It seems like a low expectation.

I think adcoms are rarely "impressed," which is why I set the bar so high.
Click to expand...

Sure, a Science pub would be impressive. I think nobody would disagree with that. But the bar you set is too high. I mean, if you mean you want an adcom to say, "I think this kid is a genius!" then sure, the bar is infinitely high and you get maybe one of those a year. But if impressing an adcom simply means making the adcom think, "Oh, I would like to meet this kid and learn more about him/her!" then any meaningful publication would suffice.

Knowing the research you did is no easy task - if you think you know the research you're doing, go to a PhD defense. That's the level of knowledge about your project you should be shooting for. Nobody cares if you can describe the experiments you did in fine detail. It's the meaning that matters. Anybody can describe what experiments they ran and almost anybody can explain how their experiments tie in to the bigger picture. But that's not how science works - that's just a very small, last piece of the puzzle. Few people can describe why they ran their experiments and justify them versus other approaches. Even fewer can articulate their original hypotheses and justify them - especially since most undergrads don't work on projects that are their own and most enter into grad students' or post-docs' projects. Some even spend their "research" time making buffers or cleaning glassware. Keeping up with the literature is essential to answer this last class of questions and these are the most important ones. It distinguishes somebody who did actual research and somebody who did "research" to check off a box.
 
chemist16 said:
Sure, a Science pub would be impressive. I think nobody would disagree with that. But the bar you set is too high. I mean, if you mean you want an adcom to say, "I think this kid is a genius!" then sure, the bar is infinitely high and you get maybe one of those a year. But if impressing an adcom simply means making the adcom think, "Oh, I would like to meet this kid and learn more about him/her!" then any meaningful publication would suffice.

Knowing the research you did is no easy task - if you think you know the research you're doing, go to a PhD defense. That's the level of knowledge about your project you should be shooting for. Nobody cares if you can describe the experiments you did in fine detail. It's the meaning that matters. Anybody can describe what experiments they ran and almost anybody can explain how their experiments tie in to the bigger picture. But that's not how science works - that's just a very small, last piece of the puzzle. Few people can describe why they ran their experiments and justify them versus other approaches. Even fewer can articulate their original hypotheses and justify them - especially since most undergrads don't work on projects that are their own and most enter into grad students' or post-docs' projects. Some even spend their "research" time making buffers or cleaning glassware. Keeping up with the literature is essential to answer this last class of questions and these are the most important ones. It distinguishes somebody who did actual research and somebody who did "research" to check off a box.
Click to expand...

Well then I guess I'm an impressive applicant.
 
HCHopeful said:
I would like to state that you can treat the process as a checklist and still gather valuable experience and have a great learning moment.
Click to expand...

Yes, there is nothing wrong with box checking if one gains meaningful experiences out of it.
 
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