Pursuing an MD/PhD in a field totally unrelated to all of my research.

[and 99 others]

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I'm applying to an MD/PhD program and they ask on the secondary to list research interests and possible faculty I would want to work with as well as the field of interest on the primary. I am interested in population health research but have done precisely zero research in the field. All of my research, pubs, and posters are in biomedical wet lab research. Specifically neuroscience. However, I don't want to go into neuroscience. The rest of my app through volunteering and such is geared towards community work with underprivileged immigrant and minority groups and that is where my interests lie.

Would it be detrimental to list non-biomedical research interests despite all of my experience in this field being in community volunteering and political advocacy? My story is that doing bench research showed me how I can have a much broader positive impact beyond the clinic by conducting research in general and that I want to apply this to community health for underprivileged populations

 

[Seihai]

Honestly, I think you got most of the same answers in your other thread (Listing COMPLETELY different research interests in MD/PhD secondaries.) that you'll get here.

I'd agree that adcoms will question how you know you want to do research into this field without any prior experience with research in the field. From my volunteering and clinical experience, I have a passing academic interest in a certain field, but my research experience in that field proved to me that I do not like that kind of research and that I'd prefer to do other things.

There's plenty of cases where an interest in a field from volunteering/clinical experience can inform research interests, but without any experience, you can't really say for certain whether you'd be a good fit for that kind of research or whether you'd actually like it.