MD/PhD Research Essay

[narla_hotep]

For the research essay prompt, it says " Please describe your significant research experiences. In your statement, please specify your research supervisor's name and affiliation, the duration of the experience, the nature of the problem studied, and your contributions to the project."

But, does this mean only describe the research itself - methods, results, etc - or also talk about more personal things like what skills I learned, how each experience helped me become a better researcher, etc.? It's kind of hard to nail down the exact tone of this one - like a research report, or a bit more personal? Mine is currently mostly "hard science" and talking about the research itself, but it's a bit more relaxed than something in a paper and I tend to use more first person, active voice, etc. I was talking to another applicant the other day and they said my essay should be longer (I'm using almost half of the 10,000 character space) and more oriented to what I learned from research and what fields I'm interested in. But I already said a lot of that stuff in the "Why MD/PhD" essay...

Is there a right or wrong way to do the research essay? What kind of tone should it have?

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[narla_hotep]

*bump* Does anyone know about this? Or should I put it in the physician scientist forum?

 

[Lost In Transcription]

For the research essay prompt, it says " Please describe your significant research experiences. In your statement, please specify your research supervisor's name and affiliation, the duration of the experience, the nature of the problem studied, and your contributions to the project."

But, does this mean only describe the research itself - methods, results, etc - or also talk about more personal things like what skills I learned, how each experience helped me become a better researcher, etc.? It's kind of hard to nail down the exact tone of this one - like a research report, or a bit more personal? Mine is currently mostly "hard science" and talking about the research itself, but it's a bit more relaxed than something in a paper and I tend to use more first person, active voice, etc. I was talking to another applicant the other day and they said my essay should be longer (I'm using almost half of the 10,000 character space) and more oriented to what I learned from research and what fields I'm interested in. But I already said a lot of that stuff in the "Why MD/PhD" essay...

Is there a right or wrong way to do the research essay? What kind of tone should it have?

Posting in the PhysSci might be helpful.

In general, I think you put down a slightly more technical one/two dentence description of research, followed by what you learned about medicine and reseaech and how you became a better researcher etc. They want to know you can handle being pretty independent from the getgo

 

[narla_hotep]

I've tried to make my research essay more personal and add a short paragraph after each experience talking about what I learned... But I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over again. I talk about presenting my research in my personal statement (as part of an anecdote), I spend literally half of my MD/PhD essay talking about my research interests and what I learned from research (lab skills, independence, presentations skills, reading papers, etc.) and how it helped me develop perseverance and time management, etc. And I say something similar again in my Work/Activities section again as part of my "most meaningful experience" description. I'm running out of new ways to phrase this same sentiment...

Would it seriously hurt my application if I just use the research essay to talk about my two main projects? It gets a bit technical but the tone is semi informal - first person, no citations, etc. It's just a straightforward chronological explanation of what I did and why.

Maybe my issues are just being caused by my subconscious urge to just be *done* with the primary app already...

 

[MSTPtastic]

I've tried to make my research essay more personal and add a short paragraph after each experience talking about what I learned... But I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over again. I talk about presenting my research in my personal statement (as part of an anecdote), I spend literally half of my MD/PhD essay talking about my research interests and what I learned from research (lab skills, independence, presentations skills, reading papers, etc.) and how it helped me develop perseverance and time management, etc. And I say something similar again in my Work/Activities section again as part of my "most meaningful experience" description. I'm running out of new ways to phrase this same sentiment...

Would it seriously hurt my application if I just use the research essay to talk about my two main projects? It gets a bit technical but the tone is semi informal - first person, no citations, etc.

My understanding is that the purpose of the essay is to let your interviewers know what you've done. It's not to convince them of anything. Let the rest of the application do that.

If you were explaining your research to a bio PhD in another field, how would you go about doing that? You want to presume they know what DNA is, for example, but maybe not the specifics of your disease or protein of interest.

 

[narla_hotep]

If you were explaining your research to a bio PhD in another field, how would you go about doing that?

That's basically the tone of my essay right now - saying when and in whose lab I did the research, giving some background on the project, describing some experiments, and moving on to my other project, then talking a bit about the clinical applications. It's just like I'd present it to someone else who's knowledgeable about cell biology but not in my specific field.