Research opportunities outside of one's residency program?

[allsadandstuff]

Hello, everyone. Does anyone have advice on how to find scholarly opportunities outside of our programs? I'm not in one of those programs where research or other scholarly pursuits are going on everywhere, so I was wondering how to go about finding remote opportunities. Should I just randomly reach out to programs with research or scholarly projects that I'd be interested in? Thank you.

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[tr]

Is there really nothing at all going on within your program? Honestly I get many of these cold-emails from outside trainees and I don't usually answer them, there are just too many and it is unrealistic. It is often clear from the text of the email that they have spammed large numbers of faculty members in many different fields.

Taking on a volunteer trainee from another institution makes no sense for us as they don't have access to our EMR or other systems so we would have to get them set up through the volunteer office, which is a huge hassle, meanwhile there are lots of internal trainees who are interested, local and already affiliated.

What is your goal with respect to the scholarly opportunities? Is there a specific career objective for which you need to demonstrate research involvement?

 

[pazzer2]

A lot of clinical trial data is now available for research purposes. There are many consortiums and repositories that hold datasets (imaging, genetic, etc). There is also the NIMH data archive.

As long as you can come up with an interesting hypothesis, there is a way to test them retrospectively. Try to come up with some interesting things to examine, and then approach people to see if they want to participate. Find people who are doing similar research via pubmed, or within your same institution.

 

[Taddy Mason]

What is your goal with respect to the scholarly opportunities? Is there a specific career objective for which you need to demonstrate research involvement?

Second this. My program has some but fairly minimal research-research, but plenty of faculty who are still involved in some degree of scholarly work and have been more than willing to help out residents with publishing, starting up projects, supervising along the way, etc. just by reaching out. I’ve seen this with friends/colleagues at other programs as well that don’t have a lot of active research. Obviously this takes more effort on your part and is unlikely to result in ground breaking research but it’s a fairly reasonable approach if you have an itch to be involved in this type of work. Alternatively, other departments in the hospital may have more research going on that may overlap with psych in which you could get involved. Also, research is pretty negligible when applying to psych fellowships if that’s a factor. Do you have really specific research interests or feel you need to be involved in a specific type and level of research for career objectives? Are you wanting a strictly research/academic oriented career? Or are you just unhappy with where you matched and looking to explore different avenues in making connections in hopes of transferring programs?