Shadowing for MD/PhD Programs

[missilesmissile]

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Hi all,

I was wondering what would constitute sufficient clinical exposure for an MD/PhD applicant, both in time spent shadowing as well as diversity of experience. Among the specialties, is there also a bias towards specific ones -- would it also be potentially harmful to shadow a more clinically-oriented physician (eg emergency med)?

Thank you for the help.

 

[Lucca]

The traditional advice is to have between 50-150 hrs of clinical experience and spend the rest of the time in the lab. I don’t believe there is a bias *against* shadowing any particular physician but having some kind of exposure to physician scientists IRL will benefit you I think in that interacting with them will help you speak more knowledgeably about your decision to become one. This has been my experience.

FWIW I had about 90 hours of shadowing, mostly in IM subspecialties, a few surgeons, about 100 hrs clinical volunteering all in primary care.

 

[ganglia777]

if you have about 50 hours, and can talk intelligently about 2-3 cases you saw, it should be good enough. MD/PhD programs are supposed to train people that want to spend the majority of their time doing research, so having good research experience is more important.

 

[ClimbsRox]

I had about ~120 hours recruiting patients for clinical studies in the ER and some thing like 20-40 hours shadowing in the ICU as the sum total of my clinical experiences. You see everything in the ER, so its not a bad "clinical exposure" experience.

 

[nakamarra]

I had 0 hours of shadowing, but ~150 hours as a clinic volunteer, directly interacting with patients to record history, vitals, etc. I agree with ganglia777, as long as you have about 2-3 cases within your experience that you can talk about in a meaningful way, you should be fine.

 

[moggat]

This is not the prevailing opinion on SDN, but I'm going to plug it anyway: make sure you do some real, sold shadowing with a physician-scientist (doesn't need to be an MDPhD per se, but someone who does translational work). THE biggest asset I had in applications/interviews was showing that I really understood the working reality of being a physician-scientist and all that it would entail.

"Real, solid shadowing" doesn't necessarily mean anything specific numerically, but make sure that you're actually watching/absorbing how the physician interacts with patients, and how their research informs their clinical work and visa versa, and how that might look for yourself.