Besides high MCAT and GPAs, what do you look for in ECs? How important is research?
Hi Goro,
The short answer is yes: research is a key element.
However, perhaps a different, more nuanced perspective would be to think about
future leadership and productivity potential. Top medical schools (and graduate schools in general) usually have the mission that goes something like "to train the next generation of
leaders." So if you are thinking about what are the paths for a future leader in medicine, you could come up with a couple of different paths: one of those paths is certainly research (of all sorts); another of those paths is public policy; and still a third might be public service.
In general, most prestigious schools fight over applicants (that small pool of applicants that will be accepted to whole list of top schools) that have already demonstrated a proving track record of above-average excellence both in their academics and in applying their intelligence and hard-work to a real world application (say research or working in Africa or in consulting or...). Top schools do not produce great doctors per se, instead they select people who are already going to be great doctors, brand them with their school name, and let them loose with funding and access to existing cutting edge opportunities and leaders in the field.
So the question becomes: what does a future leader of research in academic medicine look like applying to medical school? What would distinguish them from someone who just checked off the research box on their application with a summer in a lab? There will certainly by MD/PhD applicants with first or second author publications in major journals applying next to you (but in many ways that's just getting lucky with the right lab while in undergrad). Now don't read that last sentence as "I have a first author Nature paper to get into Harvard Med," cuz that's crazy and not correct. I am just saying that there likely will be one or two applicants who do, and these are applicants who are going to have demonstrated in their coursework, spare time spent in the lab, and in their letters of rec from research mentors that they are 100% dedicated to making medicine better through research. A future leader in research will be thinking about gaining exposure and expertise in the areas that will produce the next wave of breakthroughs (think Crispr, Big Data Analytics, Cell-therapies and immunomodulation, Biomaterials, Stem cells, Outcomes research, etc...). A future leader will usually have already started applying for opportunities to work for summer in a lab at a prestigious institution, apply for a student fellowship at the NIH, maybe even take a year off after school to get a paper published.
Does you see what I am getting at? It's not that YOU have to be this person. It's more that you have to think strategically about what it is that you want to contribute and start building that career now, proactively stepping out to take advantage of every opportunity out there to get you closer to that future. That way when you apply your application reflects that work and that future potential, not just that you checked all the boxes and beat other students.
