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Finding research in clerkship


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Hi all! I'm a 3rd year currently doing clerkship. It's going well, but I don't have as much research experience as I'd like. I had one project that I was working on earlier this year that got derailed for a number of reasons (PI moved away, COVID, etc.), and that's it. I'm finding it difficult to start another research project from scratch during clerkship. I don't have connections in research so I'm just emailing people doing work I find interesting to see if I can contribute in some way, and so far, no success. I don't have any background in basic science research so that doesn't help... I've been advised to talk to the staff I work with on my rotations about involvement opportunities, but so far, no luck (mostly been working with people who don't do research), and I'm starting to get a little nervous because time flies. 

This deep into medical school, I really do want to do more scholarly work to figure out if it's something I enjoy and that I would want to incorporate into my future career (that would strongly affect my choice for specialty and program in CaRMS...). Do you guys have any advice for someone like me to find ways to get involved? Should I just keep emailing? All my friends who do research have undergraduate experience + connections + projects that are carried over from the pre-clerkship years, so I feel a little alone in this. Thanks!

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In med school, I had absolutely no research experience and I ended up with a residency in a small surgical specialty. During my residency, I had a research rotation and from zero experience, I became very productive with many book chapters, etc. I hadn't realized just how productive I had been until my cohorts told me of their research experience during their rotations. Accordingly, my advice is relax, let it go and your time will come in research quite naturally down the road. You aren't missing anything at this stage of the game.

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You could ask attendings if they have interesting cases to do case reports. Those are usually pretty quick and you could write it up possibly within a week. 

The downside is they are not going to end up in any high impact journals, so you can't be choosy when publishing them. 

Alternatively you can do some education oriented stuff, like help improve curriculum for med school, clerkship etc. Those are pretty boring and labor intensive, but you might get a lot of contact time with whoever the attending is responsible for curriculum design.

Also depends on where you practice, research could become a chore. In community settings honestly nobody cares how many articles you've published and what the impact factor of the journal is or how many times it's been cited etc. Everyone gets paid the same billing code no matter you have 0 articles or you have 5 PhD degrees lol.

If you wanna do research in the community, great, but it's going to be unpaid most likely and outside your clinical time. So if you wanna do it as a hobby, go for it, but don't expect to get much in terms of remuneration or recognition for it.

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