As an incoming M1 I feel like “research” is a major buzzword. Making sure one participates in research throughout their medical education appears to be extremely important for matching into certain competitive specialties. This is a general question about medical student’s research experiences and specifically those that entered school without previous research work. What have your experiences been like when participating in research? Is it necessary to have prior knowledge of research methods or are students mostly doing leg work? Do most programs have courses students can take to prepare them for this type of work or do you feel this is unnecessary and one learns as they go? Would anyone recommend certain books to become familiar with research practices? Am I completely overthinking this and once you are placed on a project you essentially just follow instructions? Thank you!
Research as medical student w/o prior experience
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It is indeed a buzzword. To answer your question, you will find all the above. If you want, you can spend your spare time learning R, SAS, or statistical methodology if you feel you're savvy enough to do your own work if you have prior experience. Students for the most part are doing mostly leg work for retrospective chart reviews (case-control, case series/reports). Even most the most productive ones are finding ways to churn out meta-analyses which require no new data collection and simply some medical writing skills and knowledge of stats if you don't want to rely on university services. You will usually only be privy to original work if you're willing to invest a lot of time, if you know someone, or if are in the MD/PhD avenue.
Overall, you don't need to come in with any experience to do the research required for ANY field whether that be Orthopedic Surgery, ENT, etc. which you identified required mainly legwork potentially mixed in with some technical knowledge you will be have to pick up along the way. One piece of advice not mentioned yet is to avoid falling for the early research fever where everyone's trying to find research the moment they step on campus. Just settle in first, figure out what your classes are going to be throwing at you, what your schedule will be in response, and then when you feel you've gotte your footing, you can start contacting people. Most schools will have an Excel sheet with some opportunities. You can also find help by contacting the program director of the specialty you're interested in at your medical school so they can direct you to people who may be working on things. I agree with everyone saying there will be plenty of opportunities. The key is to find the right one where you can have results before you apply for residency and one where there is an open-channel of communication between you and your PI/Point of contact.
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It's all dependent on what kind of research you get involved in. Generally, people aren't averse to med students without methodological experience. For wet lab work, you will learn the methods along the way and will probably be assigned a mentor in the lab who is already familiar with the techniques, whether that's a senior medical student or a graduate student or a post-doc. That's because each field has its own unique methods and instruments so it's impossible to expect you to know all the methods before joining.
If you're doing clinical work, a lot of the work will either be chart review or running stats. Chart review is what most med students will be doing and that doesn't require any experience. Just be willing to learn how to use the EMR and be prepared to dig through charts looking for information. You should know how to use a spreadsheet. For stats, this will be more difficult if you don't know some stats going in (and specifically, how those stats are implemented in either spreadsheet program or programming language like R). For these, there are tons of modules online for learning how to implement stats. If you don't know any stats (like what t-tests, chi-square, regressions are and when to use them), then you should probably take a stats class.
If you're doing clinical work, a lot of the work will either be chart review or running stats. Chart review is what most med students will be doing and that doesn't require any experience. Just be willing to learn how to use the EMR and be prepared to dig through charts looking for information. You should know how to use a spreadsheet. For stats, this will be more difficult if you don't know some stats going in (and specifically, how those stats are implemented in either spreadsheet program or programming language like R). For these, there are tons of modules online for learning how to implement stats. If you don't know any stats (like what t-tests, chi-square, regressions are and when to use them), then you should probably take a stats class.
The most important thing is to find a mentor who is willing to work and invest in you, a medical student. Don’t just look at the faculty’s productivity because he/she can be productive but not with med students.
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All great points. It really depends on what the PI is looking for - some will receive applications from many medical students for funded positions so you can imagine the competition is tougher and prior research experiences will likely play an important role. Just be prepared to do some digging for other opportunities in case things don't work out with one experience.
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