I am trying to get involved on a clinical research project within the next year or two. Do you guys think it would be best to do it during 2nd year, 3rd year, or take a year off to do it? If you recommend 2nd or 3rd year, how much time per week do you think is feasible to dedicate to research?
Year off: The years of your life are precious. A year off for research estranges you from your medical school class, costs you a year of a fulfilling adult life, and also costs you 200K+ of a physician's salary and an extra year of compounded debt (potentially another 100+K) and in exchange provides you a handful of CV bullets. Unless you are dead set on a super competitive field and also both you and your advisors are certain that you need research to achieve that goal (dermatology maybe?) don't take a year off.
When to start: The small amount of clinical research I have been involved in has always taken a lot of days, but relatively few actual hours, so I would start as soon as possible. Sending out emails next week is not a bad idea. For example, for a data mining projects, a sample timeline:
-Send an email to a department head in your field of choice (and maybe a few other fields), get a list of potential advisors, trade emails with them over several weeks or even months
-find an advisor, set a meeting, wait two weeks.
-Meet your advisor and develop a plan for a project
-Spend a day doing CITI training and getting approved to access IRB.net and submit a project,
-spend about 100 hours researching your topic and writing an IRB, submit it to your advisor for edits, wait a month.
- Get the edits and comments back, rewrite and resubmit it to the advisor, wait another month.
- Get advisor approval to submit, send to the IRB, wait three months.
-Get THEIR edits and comments, rewrite resubmit it, wait a month.
-Get IRB approval, do anywhere from 100-1000 hours of data mining, submit to the statistician, wait two months.
-Get the data back, do a write up for a journal, submit to advisor, wait a month.
- Get advisors edits, rewrite and resubmit to your advisor, wait a month
-Get your advisors approval to submit to the journal of CV bullets, hit send, wait three months
-Get THEIR edits and comments, rewrite and resubmit, wait three months
-Paper is accepted, it will be published in 3-12 months
No more than a month of actual work but potentially over two years from the start of a project to a publication. My recommendation would be to try an get a few different irons in the fire as soon as you can and then follow through as fast as you can.