Mentioning Research Done in Class in Interviews/Secondaries

[NYCVillain]

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Hi
I have had two extracurricular research experiences during my undergrad: one was an independent epidemiological study and the other was a clinical research assistant (screening, consent, etc). I totaled around 400 hours combined, and have some productivity to show. My school also has research intensive lab courses which are 4 credit. In the course I took (wet lab), a lot of the data we obtained is going to be used for the professor's greater work in his own lab. Of course I'm not going to mention this as a research experience on my AMCAS app, but do you think it would be silly to mention this course as wet-lab research experience when asked about research experiences in interviews or in any secondaries. The course was pretty intensive and the results my group gathered were pretty novel.

 

[907914]

Hi
I have had two extracurricular research experiences during my undergrad: one was an independent epidemiological study and the other was a clinical research assistant (screening, consent, etc). I totaled around 400 hours combined, and have some productivity to show. My school also has research intensive lab courses which are 4 credit. In the course I took (wet lab), a lot of the data we obtained is going to be used for the professor's greater work in his own lab. Of course I'm not going to mention this as a research experience on my AMCAS app, but do you think it would be silly to mention this course as wet-lab research experience when asked about research experiences in interviews or in any secondaries. The course was pretty intensive and the results my group gathered were pretty novel.

Why wouldn’t you mention this on your AMCAS activities? Who cares if it was for a class, it was research. I am listing everything from National presentations I have done down to a 2 month project in a “Biological investigation” class.

 

[premedprepa]

I've taken a directed research studies class for biology for some credits, and plan to list that on AMCAS. I don't see why you wouldn't list something like this on your app. What I do is still research, even though it is contributory to the professor's own research and I will not get a poster or pub out of it.

 

[907914]

I've taken a directed research studies class for biology for some credits, and plan to list that on AMCAS. I don't see why you wouldn't list something like this on your app. What I do is still research, even though it is contributory to the professor's own research and I will not get a poster or pub out of it.

Even then, at some universities students can and do present the professors research that they participated in as posters and will be listed on pubs.

 

[jarednogeek]

A 1 semester class research poster was the only research I did and I researched at a T20 I definitely put it on my amcas and it was talked about in every interview in a positive way.

 

[chemdoctor]

Why wouldn’t you mention this on your AMCAS activities? Who cares if it was for a class, it was research. I am listing everything from National presentations I have done down to a 2 month project in a “Biological investigation” class.

I took an upper division Bio lab and it was literally a three credit lab with experiments nonstop. Centrifuging, PCRing, eluding DNA, etc. can I list this eventually too?

 

[907914]

I took an upper division Bio lab and it was literally a three credit lab with experiments nonstop. Centrifuging, PCRing, eluding DNA, etc. can I list this eventually too?

That depends: Was it hypothesis-driven (I.e. trying to answer a question) or was it just to teach you techniques? If the first, then yes. If the second, then not as research but it may be valuable to list as “other” indicating the experience with techniques (but only if the class name is not specific).

If the experiments were following a procedure to come up with already known results, it does not count as research. But, if it was something where you asked a question and followed different methods to try to answer it then yah, that counts.

I can give my class based example: 11 week long lower division class, the first 4 weeks were teaching us what bacteriophages are and how to isolate and purify them. Then, we spent 6 weeks answering our own small group questions of our own design. Even if you were answering questions of the professors and not your own, if you were involved in the collecting, reporting and analysis of results then you are GTG.

 

[aldol16]

I would mention it on AMCAS as research if it was novel scientific research, performed with the scientific method in mind. That is, there is a novel hypothesis that has not been tested before that you gathered data to test. Which has some implication in the real world.

 

[NYCVillain]

Yeah you guys are right. If anything they can just ignore it. But the class definitely was hypothesis driven, taught me important research skills (blotting, pulldown assays, RT-PCR, Protein/RNA isolation), and produced novel results which definitley xan have implications, so I’ll include it