First off, you’re definitely not alone. A lot of people enter med school with little to no formal research experience, and it doesn’t mean you’re already behind beyond repair. The biggest thing is to start early, be intentional, and make it as easy as possible for faculty to say yes.
For dermatology specifically, I’d recommend starting by identifying faculty at RFU, nearby institutions, and affiliated hospitals who are publishing in derm, cutaneous oncology, psoriasis, eczema, health disparities in dermatology, dermatopathology, cosmetic derm, or whatever area you’re most interested in. Then send short, personalized emails that show you actually looked at their work. Something like: “I saw your recent paper on ___ and was especially interested in ___ because ___. I’m an incoming MS1 at RFUCMS hoping to get involved in dermatology research, and I’d be grateful for the opportunity to help with chart review, data extraction, literature review, case reports, or any ongoing projects.”
The hard part is that doing this manually takes forever: finding faculty, checking PubMed, reading abstracts, and writing personalized emails one by one. That’s actually why I’m currently building an AI tool called **PitchLab**. The idea is that a student can enter their background, the specialty they’re targeting, the institution/location they want, and how many professors they want to reach out to. Then PitchLab helps identify relevant faculty and generate personalized outreach emails based on their publications, instead of sending generic cold emails.
It’s still in development, but this exact situation is basically the problem I’m trying to solve: students who are motivated but don’t know where to start or don’t have research connections yet. I’d love feedback from you or anyone else reading this. Would a tool like this be useful for someone trying to break into research early in med school? And if anyone wants to test it out for free when it’s ready, I’d be happy to have early users.
