Research - necessary to add or no?

[chssoccer7]

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Background:
10 years in Navy in the nuclear power field where I also racked up a large amount of leadership and teaching hours, back in school now and have gotten all A's but I had a 1.7 GPA semester 10 years ago before I dropped out to join the military so my overall GPA is only around a 3.2-ish at the moment.

Current ECs:
I have commenced volunteering at a homeless shelter near me (aiming for 100 hours by app time), and I also just started volunteering at an emergency department volunteering role to accumulate clinical hours (aiming for 200 hours by app time). I am struggling to find shadowing, but I will keep pressing on that as I know it is necessary.

Reason for the question:
I am taking Orgo 1/2 and the associated labs this summer so I can take Biochem in the fall. The goal is then MCAT in the spring of 2023 so I can apply in fall of 2023 and hopefully matriculate in fall 2024 after I graduate undergrad. I am quite busy doing all of this and also studying to get As to raise my GPA as much as I can since I am dealing with mitigating the bad effect on my grades from the past. I do not have any research whatsoever, is this something that will be looked down on that I need to fix? I am not applying to T20s, probably just my state schools here in SC and veteran friendly schools. I initially thought it wasn't really a necessary thing, but I was scrolling the MSAR and saw that most schools have around a 75% rate of accepted students who have research. You guys are always helpful, so any advice is appreciated!

 

[Dral]

It seems that research is one of the check boxes that isn't as necessary for non-trads who have been out of traditional undergrad for a decent length of time. If you come across some to work on, then great. If you don't find any, I'm not sure you need to put in a lot of effort to search it out.

Just as a friendly piece of advice for the forums: When typing out a post, it's easier for us to read through a post if it is broken up into smaller digestible paragraph/sentence pieces opposed to one large paragraph.

 

[chssoccer7]

It seems that research is one of the check boxes that isn't as necessary for non-trads who have been out of traditional undergrad for a decent length of time. If you come across some to work on, then great. If you don't find any, I'm not sure you need to put in a lot of effort to search it out.

Just as a friendly piece of advice for the forums: When typing out a post, it's easier for us to read through a post if it is broken up into smaller digestible paragraph/sentence pieces opposed to one large paragraph.

Awesome, thank you for the response. I have edited the original post to hopefully make it a bit more digestible.

I had seen that said a few times when I was searching, I just got confused because the MSAR reported high % of accepted students with research. I'm just trying to avoid any reason for an ADCOM to look at my app and say "would be awesome, but he's missing X".

 

[Bonne Nuit]

I had seen that said a few times when I was searching, I just got confused because the MSAR reported high % of accepted students with research. I'm just trying to avoid any reason for an ADCOM to look at my app and say "would be awesome, but he's missing X".

If it helps, I can put those high percentages in context for you.

When you see a figure on the MSAR that says "96% of matriculants at this school have research experience", this means that 96% of their matriculants have categorized some activity as "research" on their AMCAS applications, but keep in mind that "research" is a very broad category. An applicant's first-author Cell publication and another's mandatory undergraduate capstone research project will be placed in the same general "Research" bucket on the MSAR.

When you consider the fact that STEM majors often have mandatory research experiences as a graduation requirement, those high numbers begin to make a bit more sense. Nontrads and humanities majors are often lacking in research, but it's usually not a big deal. An absence of research experience shouldn't hurt a nontrad unless they're only targeting schools with lots of research funding/activity (e.g., the Stanfords and the WashUs of the world).