All entries for Tuesday 02 June 2015

Research as a student

With a bit of a hiatus between clinical and written exams, I thought I'd write about something unrelated to finals: research as a student.

Most of us who did science subjects for our undergraduate degrees will have had some experience of research during our undergraduate lab projects or dissertations. At medical school, although research isn't really a core part of the curriculum, it is something that is relatively easy to get involved with, excellent experience and looks great on your CV.

A very simple way of doing this is through audit. An audit measures performance against a standard, so you can do an audit against pretty much any guideline that you can find, whether that is NICE guidance, local hospital policy or something else. During my general practice block, I had to do an audit, I chose to look at whether GPs were prescribing stomach protective drugs with NSAID painkillers, which can cause gastric ulcers in certain at risk patients. After I did the audit, I presented it to the practice, then re-audited 3 months later. I made the results into a poster, and submitted it to the annual RCGP conference, where it was accepted! There were 3 other Warwick students presenting posters at the same conference, and of the prizes given out for audit and posters, 3 went to medical students.

Another way of getting into research whilst a student is to find a supervisor who has an ongoing project that you're interested in. My boyfriend chose to do his elective in ITU, and focussed on research whilst he was there. From the research he did, he's managed to publish a paper and present his work at 2 international conferences (I went with him to the one in Barcelona, it's a tough job....)

These are just a few examples that I know the details of, but loads of students have presented at various conferences and a fair few have managed to get a publication.

Not only is research a great way of making your CV stand out (remember all doctors have a medical degree so that doesn't really make you look that great) it's also a way that students can actually help to make an impact on practice, an opportunity which doesn't come along very often!

Warwick has an academic medicine society which aims to help students to get into research, and there are also academic foundation year jobs which provide time to work in a research group. I would recommend trying to get some sort of research done as a student, because contrary to popular opinion, you will probably never have this much free time again!

Megan Earle : 02 Jun 2015 16:03 |  Tags: Mbchb Research Warwick |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem