While this is absolutely true, I see more students take this as "annoy the crap out of the PI because they don't want to do the basic research that everyone has to do and constantly want to do more / do something cooler".
While this isn't everyone, it's about 50% of the pre-med research students that I give a shot in my lab. They don't have the patience to do basic science, they don't take the time to really understand the techniques we're doing or why we do them, but they constantly ask to do more complicated experiments that they don't have the background for and that aren't particularly relevant to anything other than their view of their future CV.
Most of them end up not being offered a chance to return to the lab, and get at best a lackluster LOR for me. But you know who gets great LORs? The students that understand that research involves a lot of tedium, a lot of doing the same thing over and over, and are willing to put in the time to do those things. And do them well. They almost always get invited to become more and more involved after they've shown that they're willing to do what all of the rest of us have to do, in addition to the cool things.
I'm sure there are people like that. But consider what the OP says:
"I ask questions about the research and try to have some discussion about it, but none of the mentors seem to want to really talk to me about the projects, they just ask me to collect data and I don't get to participate in any intellectual discussion. Lots of times, my mentors are not in the lab and when I ask what I should/can be doing they just say there's nothing to do and I end up sitting around in the lab for hours. Sometimes when I ask to try/watch new experiments, I am told they are too complicated and can't do them."
To me, that doesn't sound like someone who is not interested in the basic science. It sounds like someone who is begging to be mentored, which is pretty much the PI's
only true responsibility to the student. Some students carry in their own grants and have previous experience, serving their labor to the PI on a silver platter, and they are still treated like toddlers drawing on the walls with markers.
I don't think it's fair to expect that a student be infinitely enthusiastic for years on end as their very limited runway for traditional admissions elapses while they are spinning on an office chair in the lab, relegated to minimal involvement. We both know that would not be an appropriate relationship with an undergraduate student, and such an arrangement heavily favors the PI's convenience over what is consistently presented in academia as a learning experience for the student. The labor is supposed to be a coincidental perk, not the organizing center of the experience, at least, that's what medical schools appear to try to convince us of.
If it is annoying the crap out of a PI to have a conversation about common sense milestones and establishing some ground rules so the terms of engagement are mutually beneficial, that is a very unfortunate situation given that it is literally the mentor's job to take initiative on that point and not dump responsibility for self-advocacy onto the student. In such a case it would be not only highly improper as an administrator managing labor, but also incredibly unprofessional as a mentor to expect a student to be satisfied with chronic cursory dismissal.
And then, to add insult to injury, sprinkle in a black mark on the LOR so that future opportunities are dashed with plausible deniability, even if you'll have 10 other students go through the lab in the next year or two and you won't remember this particular student with any fidelity by the time they try to use the letter.
Or no? You tell me.
This is, at least in my experience, very much not true. Anyone on an admissions committee knows that sometimes research is slow. If someone's working on a longitudinal animal model project, they might well not be on a publication. But if they display a strong understanding of the work and they have a strong letter discussing their work ethic, willingness to contribute to the project, and a combination of independence and teamwork? That's going to be a lot better than being 5th author on a bunch of token publications or having written some meta analyses that no one is going to read. Anyone who's been in the field for long enough can tell when a student was actually involved in the research vs. was just there at the right time and got a name on something, and the latter really isn't that valuable.
I agree with the spirit of your comment. Research
should be evaluated that way. From what I can tell about the residency and medical school admissions games, though, it appears nobody on the adcom has the time to undergo that kind of rigorous evaluation on the merits of any particular applicant's research. It seems an awful lot like all they care about is that it was published in a C/N/S journal and that there are a lot of them. Surely such accomplishments do not make "better" dermatologists, orthopods and neurosurgeons, but it is what is rewarded.
I am obviously not there yet but I take it that the recent changes to ERAS in the vein of consolidating scholarly contributions aims to shift the culture in that respect, though, how effective that will actually be on the student side is yet to be seen.
In general, my perception is that most physician hopefuls don't want to do research and wouldn't do so if it were not a quasi-requirement of the admissions machine. At the end of the day, it's just a completely different job. In both pre-med and medical school, the clock is ticking. Pre-meds don't want to take gap years, and medical students do not want to take research years. Both are perceived as failures, rightly or wrongly.
In that way, I think students are just reacting to the rules presented to them. They are trying to min-max on a finite resource. And, ultimately, the PI is not the only individual in their lives that insists they take the #1 priority. Every single professor/authority for every single class/activity believes they are the most important, essential conduit of information and experience for the student, and each takes on a particularly haughty attitude when confronted with the reality that the student is often balancing totally incompatible demands (including their own) pretty much by default. Nobody seems to acknowledge the irony, but everyone is very willing to poo-poo on the student for being "totally neurotic and CV crazy."
I could go on, but this has already gotten pretty long.
