Is this level of undergraduate research sufficient for medical school?

[user0710]

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Hi everyone,

I’m an undergrad in an honors research program where students work in teams for several years to design and complete an independent research project that ends in a written thesis and formal defense. The program includes literature review, proposal writing, IRB submission, data collection and analysis, and presentation of findings.

This year, my team is rotating into a wet-lab component for one semester to perform hands-on experiments related to our project. Overall, I’d estimate I’ll have around 500 total hours of research experience by the time I graduate, combining both the conceptual and laboratory parts of the project.

I’m not currently in another lab outside of this program, but I’m very involved in other academic and service commitments.

For traditional MD applicants, would this amount and type of research be considered sufficient or competitive? Or do most accepted students typically have separate, additional lab positions beyond a structured research program like this?

Thanks in advance for any insight. I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s gone through the application process or seen how adcoms view these kinds of multi-year research programs.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Hi everyone,

I’m an undergrad in an honors research program where students work in teams for several years to design and complete an independent research project that ends in a written thesis and formal defense. The program includes literature review, proposal writing, IRB submission, data collection and analysis, and presentation of findings.

This year, my team is rotating into a wet-lab component for one semester to perform hands-on experiments related to our project. Overall, I’d estimate I’ll have around 500 total hours of research experience by the time I graduate, combining both the conceptual and laboratory parts of the project.

I’m not currently in another lab outside of this program, but I’m very involved in other academic and service commitments.

For traditional MD applicants, would this amount and type of research be considered sufficient or competitive? Or do most accepted students typically have separate, additional lab positions beyond a structured research program like this?

Thanks in advance for any insight. I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s gone through the application process or seen how adcoms view these kinds of multi-year research programs.

Being part of an honors program is a plus, and I'm going to presume the research experience you get would be satisfactory. What you do will be up to your descriptions when you apply. Of course, most undergraduate universities do whatever they can to get students to be involved in research or other creative scholarship; thus, it's a checkbox. I would consider what your other plans would be if you want a career immersed in academic medicine and are aspiring for MD/PhD or a dual-degree track. But just because you know the minutia of developing a research process doesn't give you an advantage for medical school.

 

[polymerization]

I would also add that, if you can separate out those experiences (i.e., claim your broader thesis project as part of the honors college and the bench research experience as two individual things that are related in theme but not necessarily associated), you can make a better argument for yourself down the line.

Having several experiences that don't necessarily overlap but "rhyme" in theme can help you show a professional focus for a particular patient population or imminent challenge in medicine...once it's time to apply and you'll have to write essays that ask you to revisit where you've been and juxtapose it against where you are trying to convince medical schools you want to go.

In other words, yes and it's probably going to be good for you as an applicant to get the school to organize/coordinate related activities for you.

For example, my research was on cystic fibrosis, but I did advocacy around antimicrobial resistance (multi-drug resistant P. aeruginosa infection is often fatal in CF patients and is hospital-acquired).

That allowed me to make statements in my application that spanned from basic science research (the bacterium itself + mechanisms), to the patient experience (meeting/engaging with the CF patient population), and into broader health systems (antimicrobial stewardship + advocacy) and society-at-large (antibiotic misuse and broader herd immunity concerns, which dovetail well with current events and stress the importance of the work).

Being thoughtful about things like this can both allow you to distinguish yourself as an applicant and enable you to make broader statements in a way that is convincing and grounded in your own experience.

When it comes time to interview, all of your activities will hit different notes on the same scale, and it'll be easier for you to speak up and down your application because the breadth of experiences you will have to try and wrangle into a single "why" is much narrower.

I can acknowledge this is somewhat abstract, but I hope that makes sense. You might realize what I mean a little later in your process.

 

[FuturePediatricNeurosurge]

Somehow I’ve gotten 5 MD interviews so far with only ~200 shoddy research hours so it seems your research is more than enough

 

[Med Ed]

For traditional MD applicants, would this amount and type of research be considered sufficient or competitive? Or do most accepted students typically have separate, additional lab positions beyond a structured research program like this?

Most accepted students have set foot in a lab. Some have zero research. Others have thousands of hours and multiple publications.

The utility of research in your premed portfolio will depend on your career goals and the respective missions of the schools you apply to. Some schools want to train the next generation of leaders in academic medicine. They will put weight on productive research. At the other end of the spectrum are more service-oriented schools that are often trying to meet healthcare needs in specific geographical areas. They care far more about non-research aspects of the application. In between those two extremes are the majority of schools, for which research experience is seen as a positive but will seldom make or break an application.