research during medical school

[moleculardesign]

is doing 10 hours of research a week during medical school a good or a bad idea? is it doable or would grades suffer?

thanks!

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[Northerner]

is doing 10 hours of research a week during medical school a good or a bad idea? is it doable or would grades suffer?

thanks!

Why do you want to know?

 

[luv2sd]

is doing 10 hours of research a week during medical school a good or a bad idea? is it doable or would grades suffer?

thanks!

??? you are still a pre-med ???

 

[moleculardesign]

i was just wondering. i'm doing research now and enjoy it and was wondering if it is something that people continue doing when they get into medical school or not.

 

[MassTransport]

You should explore the curriculum at your candidate schools. Some have a funded research year, if that is what you're looking for. As far as concurrent research and medical school, those options are more limited.

Or you could do MD/PhD.

 

[IHeartNerds]

MS3? Probably not due to clinical rotations consuming all of your time. However, in pre-clinicals and certainly in 4th year, it's doable at most schools. How much "free" time you have varies so much between medical schools though, that it's kind of hard to say.

edit to mention that here at Penn we're required to do research ("Scholarly Pursuit") in 4th year for a significant chunk of time. The same is true at many but not nearly all schools.

 

[CCLCMer]

is doing 10 hours of research a week during medical school a good or a bad idea? is it doable or would grades suffer?

thanks!

At my school (CCLCM), it's totally doable, at least during first year. We spend about 30 hours per week doing research during the summer block of first year, and then a lot of people in my class kept doing research in the afternoons and on Thursdays all during our first year clinical blocks. Since we only have 20 hours of class per week first year, it's manageable. Second year, we have a second summer research block. After that, it would be a lot harder to keep doing research for the rest of second year because we have two clinic afternoons per week instead of just one. I'm getting ready to go to a conference next week, and having that extra research stuff to do right now is all but killing me. I'm definitely not going to do any more research for the rest of this year once I get back from the conference. After second year, you probably wouldn't be able to do research while you're doing your clinical rotations, but since we have a built-in extra year for research and we all write a senior thesis, you'd get in at least another year. You could also spent up to four months of your fifth year doing research electives if you wanted to. If you really want to do research but you don't want to go all out and do an MD/PhD, you should check out CCLCM. It's a research MD program.

 

[TheRealMD]

Some schools have tracks where you take a year off to do research (they fund you during this time). Other schools let you do research as an elective instead of another rotation. Inquire with specific schools as you what you might be interested in (most of them will tell you that the sky is the limit though).

 

[CCLCMer]

Some schools have tracks where you take a year off to do research (they fund you during this time). Other schools let you do research as an elective instead of another rotation. Inquire with specific schools as you what you might be interested in (most of them will tell you that the sky is the limit though).

Yeah, that's a good point. Just so people know, we don't pay tuition during the research year, and we even get a stipend from the school for that year. I think most schools that offer MD/MS kind of tracks probably do the same thing.