Update worthy?

[doctorendgame]

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HIPAA has recently gotten a ton of criticism because there is growing evidence that if you bridge medicine with other fields, you can improve outcomes in both of those fields and phyisicans are pushing for HIPAA reforms since HIPAA was never set up to allow medicine to integrate with other fields. One of my local hospitals launched a clinical outreach initiative (call this project 1). This initiative plans to bridge medicine and another field that I won't mention. This has never been done before because it requires navigating HIPAA and another regulatory body that governs the other field and the two regulatory bodies were never set up to interact with each other, so the simultaneous approval needed is extremely difficult. I expanded on that initiative by suggesting a research project (call this project 2) to complement another project I came up with (call this project 3). While these projects are all distinct, they share the common goal of bridging medicine and this other field.

I spoke with the physician in charge of this initiative and asked him when my mentor and I publish the manuscript for project 2, if he would like to contribute to it so he can lay out the legal framework for other hospitals to replicate the initiative. He launched this initiative and it was his idea, so he knows the legality concerning this initiative. He said he's open to it but wants to see the execution.

Is this update worthy?

Projects 2 and 3 are already mentioned in my application, so all I have to update is his contribution to the manuscript. He's in charge of project 1 and isn't involved with project 2 apart from giving me and my mentor access to the data to do the study. I also asked him if he has any noteworthy updates on his end I can potentially use for my update letter, but for now, this is all I got.

I want to send a letter of interest since I haven't heard back from a lot of schools but don't know if I should if I have nothing worth updating schools on.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Do you have results?

 

[polymerization]

I'm sure the pros will respond soon, but from my read, I'd say tread lightly.

Call me skeptical, but any time an undergrad claims ownership over a project (especially one so ambitious as to require layers of regulatory approval beyond an IRB), I have an urge to roll my eyes. The realm of research ideation and development is (in my opinion) without a doubt the role of a doctorally-trained scientist.

It's different if you're doing an honors undergraduate or master's thesis for example, because your major questions are already sort of carved out for you by a PI who knows the experiment(s) will produce serviceable data, and you are led systematically to publication; or, in the classic setup, you're working under the auspices of a grad student mentor who benefits from your routine tedious lab tasks/minor experimentation/manuscript editing enough to put you up as an author. In either case, you're not actually responsible for the intellectual work, and I think evaluators know that.

In this case, it just sounds like you are hoping to manipulate and rework data that builds on the conclusions of someone else's paper, and hoping that putting them on the paper as it theoretically nears completion will grant you retroactive legitimacy you don't have now. It's telling that someone would be willing to give you their data (implying a relationship) but decline ongoing participation or authorship. I think these factors may be playing in to your lack of confidence on how to word your updates.

Maybe I should withhold conclusions until you clarify, but I am suspicious that even putting these projects in Work & Activities given the information you have provided would have had to require stretching the truth and overstating. Schools don't care about what you want to do someday when they are going through that section—they want to know what you've already done and what you learned from it.

 

[Med Ed]

I think this could be the basis of project 4: determining whether an update can induce a migraine.

 

[doctorendgame]

I think this could be the basis of project 4: determining whether an update can induce a migraine.

That's what I was going for tbh.

 

[doctorendgame]

I'm sure the pros will respond soon, but from my read, I'd say tread lightly.

Call me skeptical, but any time an undergrad claims ownership over a project (especially one so ambitious as to require layers of regulatory approval beyond an IRB), I have an urge to roll my eyes. The realm of research ideation and development is (in my opinion) without a doubt the role of a doctorally-trained scientist.

It's different if you're doing an honors undergraduate or master's thesis for example, because your major questions are already sort of carved out for you by a PI who knows the experiment(s) will produce serviceable data, and you are led systematically to publication; or, in the classic setup, you're working under the auspices of a grad student mentor who benefits from your routine tedious lab tasks/minor experimentation/manuscript editing enough to put you up as an author. In either case, you're not actually responsible for the intellectual work, and I think evaluators know that.

In this case, it just sounds like you are hoping to manipulate and rework data that builds on the conclusions of someone else's paper, and hoping that putting them on the paper as it theoretically nears completion will grant you retroactive legitimacy you don't have now. It's telling that someone would be willing to give you their data (implying a relationship) but decline ongoing participation or authorship. I think these factors may be playing in to your lack of confidence on how to word your updates.

Maybe I should withhold conclusions until you clarify, but I am suspicious that even putting these projects in Work & Activities given the information you have provided would have had to require stretching the truth and overstating. Schools don't care about what you want to do someday when they are going through that section—they want to know what you've already done and what you learned from it.

I don't blame you for being skeptical. I would be too. But those undergrads don't have a physician mentor showing them the complexities of medicine. It's not IRB. This is a purely data-science research and their information is de-identified.

The initiative was never about research, it was originally clinical outreach; I added the research component. I actually had the research idea a few years back but my physician mentor shot the idea down because of red tapes relating to HIPAA and that other regulatory body. When this initiative was launched, it also opened the door to revive my research idea so my mentor (different person from the one of launched the initiative, try not to have a migraine) and I jumped at the opportunity. Funny enough, when I described this project, I made sure to highlight the credentials of the one who led the initiative and how we had distinctive uses for this initiative to showcase its potential and to address any potential skepticism and I also have a LOR from my mentor that I'm doing this project with.

But I guess you're right though, it's not update worthy.

 

[polymerization]

I don't blame you for being skeptical. I would be too. But those undergrads don't have a physician mentor showing them the complexities of medicine. It's not IRB. This is a purely data-science research and their information is de-identified.

The initiative was never about research, I added the research component. It was originally clinical outreach. I actually had the research idea a few years back but my physician mentor shot the idea down because of red tapes relating to HIPAA and that other regulatory body. When this initiative was launched, it also opened the door to revive my research idea so my mentor (different person from the one of launched the initiative, try not to have a migraine) and I jumped at the opportunity. Funny enough, when I described this project, I made sure to highlight the credentials of the one who led the initiative and how we had distinctive uses for this initiative to showcase its potential and to address any potential skepticism and I also have a LOR from my mentor that I'm doing this project with.

But I guess you're right though, it's not update worthy.

To be clear, I'm not trying to offend. I'm just the kind of kid that would go to my high school English teacher with an essay and ask, very matter-of-factly, "Is it crap? Tell me if it's crap so I can fix it." I much prefer that to the hand-wringing and glossing over that most people will do to protect your feelings at the cost of having their advice be ambiguous and not directly actionable. I don't feel that advice actually helps so much as produce more anxiety over reading between the lines and trying to figure out what the advisor actually meant.

If I'm being totally honest, there's a lot of lore here—about the project(s), its contributor(s), regulatory bodies, and their complexities. I've read at least 4 paragraphs about it, and really I don't feel like I'm any closer to understanding what is actually going on.

Let's just say I'm convinced of the legitimacy of the project itself. Where are you now? Trying to figure out if it will work, extrapolating and interpreting data, manuscript preparation, gearing up to submit? I'm not clear on what the substantive content of the update in your view should be.

 

[doctorendgame]

I'm trying not to get myself doxxed so that's why I left out a lot of key details, but you are right. There is a ton of lore.😆