Unhinged Things I Did To Land Research As A PreMed
Few things are as humbling as getting told no after waiting four hours for a yes.
Clinical Hours. Research Hours. Published Papers. Volunteering. GPA. MCAT. Leadership. Hours. Study. Publish. Study. Workout. Study. Hospital. Study.
There’s a lot of things that pre-med students are expected to have experience with when applying to Medical School. One of these high-value activities is research. This can be clinical research or basic science research (wet labs).
Often times many students will blindly cold email professors in their field; Neuroscience, Cell Biology, Microbiology, Chemistry. The hard truth about this is that it’s not what medical schools are looking for.
There are two main facets that medical schools will look at when they analyze your application; dedication and actionable passion.
Dedication is not 40 hours a week in a research lab; it’s two years of sustained commitment to working in a lab doing work, learning science, and accumulating critical thinking skills. You are ‘dedicated’ to your work. This serves a few purposes to medical schools, one of which is showing how you can pursue a single focus for a sustained period of time. Medical school is four years of just medicine. Further, the rest of your life as a doctor is just that; dedication to medicine.
Actionable passion is the next thing that medical schools look for. Often times I see students with two or three publications, which is great for showing dedication to a lab and is obviously actionable, but this can quickly fall short in your medical school interviews. Let me elaborate.
Aiding in a publication is a phenomenal accomplishment and most definitely something that you should detail on your application. In addition, you should understand that this is an action that demonstrates both action and dedication, but the show-stopper here is going to be how you explain your passion for the work you have done. Ensure you take notes on things you specifically contributed to, ways that you problem-solved or used your critical-thinking skills to push the work forward instead of blindly doing lab work. Write it down and store it for use in your application or your interviews, because not being able to show your passion is where many students will look like they’re checking a box instead of doing something they are passionate about.
With all that in mind, I come to the main point; picking a lab is just as important, maybe more, than the work that you end up doing inside of it. Blindly emailing professors without researching the work they do or actually feeling ‘passionate’ about the field will lead to one of the issues I spoke about before (difficult interviews, lack of dedication, low levels of individualized actions, etc.).
You may come back to say, “It’s difficult getting into just one lab!” To this point, I will agree. Yes, it is difficult. However, it is not impossible.
1. Research the Lab Thoroughly
Yes, thoroughly. Understand their research, purpose, methodologies. Do they work with animals? Are they computational? What are their projects usually geared towards?
I worked in a neuroscience lab for a long time, and although the broad topic was neuroscience, each graduate student in the lab was working on different questions. Astrocytes, dendrites, alzheimers, etc.
Once you understand all the projects, pick one or two to study further. Read the published papers. Take notes! Background research is often the part that everyone skips, but this is one of the best differentiating factors, both for getting picked and for getting a Letter of Recommendation that really holds weight.
2. Email the Professor
This is the part that most people will jump into. Compose a respectful email to the professor, while detailing what research you have done already and what research you would like to help work on in the lab.
3. Print out your Resume
First impressions really do set the stage for getting opportunities. Showing up in a nice, more professional-leaning outfit along with a nice printout of your resume can do wonders for helping a professor lean toward allowing you to volunteer in the lab.
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Further, it shows that you are taking the research position seriously and genuinely look forward to it; many more students than you might think end up dropping mid-way through the year or leave without any notice.
4. In-Person Meeting
Professors are busy people, and if I can speak from experience, it often takes them months to respond to emails just because they get so many constantly.
Some professors will see your email and respond. It may take a few forwards (only do this once-twice a week, spamming them is not the solution), but you might eventually see a reply!
Many, however, will not even see your email. It’ll get sent to their spam, or it’ll get drowned in the constant influx that professors are getting. This is where the ‘unhinged’ part of the tips come in. Pick a weekday. Clear out the entire day for studying, homework, emails, etc. Find out where the professor’s office is, and for lack of better phrasing, camp it.
If the professor comes by, or anyone else, politely ask for directions to the office or if the professor is currently in. Often times you will find that the professor works on their own hours, and they will not always be there. But you have to try, and keep trying, in the hopes that you will catch them. Important for this part: bring the printout of your resume!
The first time I camped my professors office was for four hours before they came in. I politely asked for ten minutes of their time. They said no. Flat out. They let me know they had to run to a meeting, and even though they were very respectful, it felt like a slap in the face.
Do not let a no discourage you; they are busy people! Try again, and as luck had it, I was able to speak with them the next day, while I was camping again. I had a printout of my resume, and walked in with a lot of knowledge about the lab and what I was looking to do and what I could potentially offer.
Often times this level of persistence will help you get opportunities you may often feel are impossible or out of reach!
5. Email the graduate students
If the above case is still unsuccessful, there are other ways to get into the lab.
Oftentimes the professor is very difficult to get a hold of. Comparatively, getting in touch with a graduate student will have a much higher yield of response.
Shoot out an email of interest to the graduate students in the lab; for those who are working on projects you are interested in, make sure to add that in the email! They will have a better chance of getting to talk to the professor, and even if they direct you back to the professor, chances are that they will mention you and the professor will go looking for your email!
6. Email the Adjacent Lab
In the unfortunate event that the graduate student’s do not have their emails available, there is another method.
You can research some of the labs that either fall under the same umbrella or have offices in the same building; oftentimes the graduate students or professors are in contact with or know each other.
Email one of the adjacent lab’s graduate students and gently inquire about getting into contact with one of the lab’s graduate students. Ask specifically for an email, and indicate your interest in joining that particular lab!
All this to say: even after doing all of these things, a research lab position that you wanted is not guaranteed, though I have yet to meet someone that did these things and did not end up getting the position.
Further, I am aware that a lot of these may require for you to get out of your comfort zone and contact people you have never spoken to, or do things that may seem like ‘doing too much’. I will stress right now; if you want it, it’s not ‘doing too much’ to do what you can to get it. A few days (maybe a week or two) of embarrassment right now can save you 1–2 years of working in a lab you’re not all that interested in. It can also help you channel your inner passion on your medical school application, which, trust me, the admissions committees will be able to see.
For more secrets, tips, and strategies — subscribe! I did all of this so you might not have to. Or at the very least, so you know you’re not alone when you’re sitting outside a professor’s office hoping today is the day. Let’s walk the long, and sometimes embarrassing, journey to medicine together.
