Medical Will it be a concern to adcoms if I have a lot of research hours, but no pubs?

[Goro]

Hi. Thank you in advance for the help.
Im a pre-med student in my third year looking to apply to medical schools next summer and something that has been really bothering me is that I have no publications. However, I have 4000+ hours of research. I did three poster presentations (same poster three times, first author, one of them being a national conference), and won a summer research fellowship, but those are the only tangible things I got out it. I just got really unlucky. The first lab I was a part of moved after I worked in it for like 6 months, and then my second lab was new and wasn’t really encouraging in terms of presenting and giving out pubs. I feel like medical schools will see this as a big fault in my application to have 4,000+ hours, but no publications. Please give me advice on how to approach it in my application. Thank you.

All this is irrelevant without knowing what the test of your app is like

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[Goro]

- ORM
-Midwest resident, large public university
-Math and Neuro dual degree, 3.99 cGPA, 3.99 sGPA
- 526 MCAT
- Around 700 volunteering hours (50% clinical and 50% non-clinica)
- 120 shadowing hours (family physician, nuerosurgery, pediatric cardiology, adult congenital disease Cardiology, Interventional cardiology)
- President of 2 well known clubs with awards, Ochem TA (2 years), Resident Advisor (1 year), peer tutor (1 year)
- Started a tutoring program for underserved communities
- App-developer, won two awards at hospital and got funding to further develop it
- Interned and developed a ideal-state process map at local hospital to reduce readmissions and presented it to the hospital quality team
- Other ECs

UG students with pubs are RARE. It's more important that you learn something about the scientific method.
I can't see any problem for you even with dealing with the research ******

 

[lord999]

If you are going to MD/PhD, you still would be fine considering lack of publications. Each field has some guidance on productivity, but it is not common at all for undergraduates to publish and for certain fields, it actually raises questions. I would even try for Mayo if you are Midwest.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

4000 hours is a two years of full-time work for research. How can this be while you are also a full-time student with junior standing?

So are you doing Ph.D.? M.D.? both? You definitely have the metrics for MD/PhD with respect to grades/MCAT. Not sure how much shadowing you have though it seems clinical exposure is okay.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

ya it was a lot of work, which is why it is so upsetting that I didn’t get publications out of it. I just had bad luck with which lab I joined. Some labs my friends were in just gave out publications for a small fraction of the work I did. I’m actually much more than junior standing, I have something like 170 credit hours, I’ve taken 18 credit hours almost every semester except one (do they consider that for applications?)

I have around 120 hours shadowing. And I want to do an M.D. and maybe apply for a dual degree after my first year.

Publications are a bit overrated. I just wanted to be sure you actually worked two years without classes as a full-time research assistant and not as a student. When you add up all your other activities hours, that really raises questions without a reasonable explanation. Yes, screeners will also observe whether you have taken overload semesters, and it's not always deemed positively. We're just having an issue for the type of program you'll be aiming for.

Those hours are from 2 full-time summers , 2 full-time winter breaks and 5 semesters when I was a student. Why would overload semesters be deemed negatively? Would that be the case if I wasn’t doing anything else those semesters?

 

[TheBoneDoctah]

You will be fine. Your research experience is amazing it seems and I am sure you will be able to talk about research extensively to any admin committee (which is the important part). I can count on one hand the number of undergraduate students I know who had publications coming into medical school and didn't know any who had first-authored papers. Your GPA/MCAT should carry you through. I am amazed you were able to keep up your GPA/MCAT with that many research hours. Congrats!