ophtho_gunner Posted July 7, 2011 Report Share Posted July 7, 2011 Hello, My girlfriend who is going into MS2 has asked me if it will be manageable to conduct research DURING the academic school year? I just wanted to get opinions from you guys as to what you think? She does not use pm101 and hence I'm the cover guy for her. I know that pre-clerkship is quite time consuming (just finished that!) and I am doubting if I'd be able to handle research along with school. Not sure about her but maybe you guys can throw in pointers which I can share with her. I guess it will also depend on her supervisor as to how many hours he/she requires her to put in every week. Regards, Ophtho Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EoE Posted July 7, 2011 Report Share Posted July 7, 2011 Is it clinical research? Sometimes you can just recruit patients throughout the school year and take care of some of the details during the school year (reimbursement set up/ethics approval/etc), but I haven't started yet so I can't comment from experience. I am going to be coordinating a prospective study with a questionnaire and a couple minor interventions next year during my first year of meds. Hopefully I can manage it. The residents that came and tried to do 1 or 2 months in the lab sucked. With call, they just couldn't get their heads into it and like 6 weeks is just not enough time. Only a sample of 3 residents though, there are lots who are great at research I bet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ophtho_gunner Posted July 7, 2011 Author Report Share Posted July 7, 2011 Is it clinical research? Sometimes you can just recruit patients throughout the school year and take care of some of the details during the school year (reimbursement set up/ethics approval/etc), but I haven't started yet so I can't comment from experience. I am going to be coordinating a prospective study with a questionnaire and a couple minor interventions next year during my first year of meds. Hopefully I can manage it. The residents that came and tried to do 1 or 2 months in the lab sucked. With call, they just couldn't get their heads into it and like 6 weeks is just not enough time. Only a sample of 3 residents though, there are lots who are great at research I bet. Prospective seems more challenging. Yes shes gonna do clinical research. its retrospective chart study. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EoE Posted July 7, 2011 Report Share Posted July 7, 2011 Ah retrospective might be more work though. Since she can't set things on autopilot (get the people with MDs to evaluate patients as they come in once things are set up). I have a paper that is a retrospective chart study. It is totally doable during the school year b/c she can walk away from it and come back to it as needed. People who talk about research being so hard when they are busy often have experiments or animals that they have to take care of at very specific scheduled times. I would tell her to go for it because the problems with chart review arise more from tedium in my experience. Another thing I can't resist warning about... Of course I don't know the scale or size of the study but one thing I found was that I collected a lot more info than I needed from each chart. It slowed things down a lot. No need to collect extra data if she probably isn't going to use it. It gets really hard if the data cannot be quantified in some way. Like no clear 'yes' or 'no' for that question. For instance, I spent a lot of time looking at medications (drug, type, route, dose, schedule, term) for each patient, which varied widely and also were complicated because a lot pts were taking meds for a lot of different conditions when diagnosed for our study. So complicated! I ended up just not analyzing the medication data even though I collected it for >300 patients! Best of luck to her with the study! I can answer some stats questions too if that ever comes up. Might want to make sure she has access to someone who knows how to analyze the stats too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doctor2 Posted July 8, 2011 Report Share Posted July 8, 2011 i'm doing more than 1 research project during clerkship... they are just chart reviews.. so there are down times... i just work on it on some weekeneds when i'm more free, and then less on others... it's manageable Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
torontomd13 Posted July 8, 2011 Report Share Posted July 8, 2011 Hello, My girlfriend who is going into MS2 has asked me if it will be manageable to conduct research DURING the academic school year? I just wanted to get opinions from you guys as to what you think? She does not use pm101 and hence I'm the cover guy for her. I know that pre-clerkship is quite time consuming (just finished that!) and I am doubting if I'd be able to handle research along with school. Not sure about her but maybe you guys can throw in pointers which I can share with her. I guess it will also depend on her supervisor as to how many hours he/she requires her to put in every week. Regards, Ophtho Totally doable. In fact, UofT offers a research scholarship to students in Years 1 & 2 to pursue research alongside school. Check out the CREMS Scholar program. http://crems.med.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=94 But yes, things need to be negotiated with your PI beforehand i.e something like 5 hours/week during the year and full time in the summer or some variation of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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