MD Should my research interests align with my specialty interests?

[djsbaseball2014]

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Hey everyone,

Current M1 here who has to complete a 2 year long research project at my medical school. We have been given a list of mentors and potential projects but I am having a hard time trying to figure out what is the best thing to do. I am currently interested in anesthesia or emergency medicine and dont know if it is worth my time to pursue research in one of those fields. There is a research project that interests me but it is more on the education side. It deals with chronically ill kids and how they learn through robotics and virtual reality.

However, I dont want to pursue it if it will be irrelevant to PD's in the future.

 

[wanderingorion]

The general consensus is: research is research. It's not so much the topic, but learning the process. Pursue what you're interested in, since you have to do it for 2 years. But, if you change your mind regarding specialties, it won't hurt you.

 

[mvenus929]

Agreed. Do research that you're interested in, because it's really hard to finish something that you don't like.

 

[Sterling_Archer]

Research in specialty > Research >>>>>> no research

Keep in mind that neither anesthesia nor emergency medicine care much about research at this point.

TBH, just do either something you're interested in or something that you can easily get a first or second author on.

Edit: grammar

 

[NickNaylor]

In an ideal world, sure, it'd be great if your research activities aligned what your long-term career goals. In actuality that can be quite challenging for a variety of reasons, not least of all a change in what you're actually interested in doing.

As mentioned above, all research experience is valuable. Doing something that you actually find interesting will probably make the work more tolerable and less of a beat down. And, ultimately, if you get something tangible out of the experience - e.g., publication, abstract, presentation, etc. - having that will still mean something. People understand that interests change. It's nearly impossible to create a completely coherent "narrative" with all of your activities over a long period of time.