undergrad research

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pnoybballin

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can someone give me info on undergrad research? ive been hearing a lot of people saying medical schools love it and it looks very good on your application...
 
Yes it does look good on your application, but it's not absolutely necessary in order for a school to accept you.

Do it only if you want to and think you'd enjoy it.
 
i am doing research in a professor's lab but i was just wondering if an intensive lab class that allows you to work on your own experiment (which is a part of the professor's on-going research) counts toward research experience?

We have a class at our school and students usually spends 15+hours a week working on their projects...
 
You should check with the schools you plan on applying to. I don't think so, but I do not know for sure.
 
It's my understanding that things that are a requiremen of a class are not considered to be research. sorry.
 
I am doing research in computational chemistry. Bascially I have studied 1 reaction the entire semester. If you introduce Li2 (lithium) to biphenylene with ultrasound, the ring opens up to give you a biphenyl molecule. What I have to do is use a computer to find the mechanism of this reaction. I tell the computer to make a potential energy surface of a structure that I suspect may be a ground state structure. The computer then optimizes the geometry of the structure to obtain a minimum energy. The computer does this by basically "walking" along the potential energy surface and stops when it gets to a minimum point. When the minimum point is found the computer then does frequency calculations. If there are imaginary eigenvalues (which comes from a bunch of quantum theory stuff) then the strucuture that was minimized is some sort of transition state structure which I am not interested in. My goal is to keep optimizing structures until I find a structure that gives frequency calculations resulting in all real numbers. This means that the structure optimized is indeed a ground state structure. Next, when I find two ground state structures, I do another calculation, known as a QST2 calc to try to link those two structures together. If after I find the structure that is inbetween those 2 ground state strucutures results in 1 imaginary frequency, then it is likely that that structure is a transition state from ground state structure A to ground state structure B. You can kind of get the idea of what I am doing. I am basically taking a bunch of peices of a "movie" of a reaction and trying to put them together in the right order--simply by using a computer, no lab work at all. When the movie is finally complete we can get a pretty good idea of how the reaction proceeds from start to finish. It is actually quite interesting stuff. I don't know how the computer actually does these calculations though. How the program works goes way over my head into theoretical physics and chemistry.
 
I'm doing several projects including a case study and a couple of epidemiological reviews. There is also talk of a clinical treatment study, but that will be pending some tests using a hypobaric chamber.
 
zippo on research here.

like potato said, do it if you want to, but you certainly don't have to.
 
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