Loving Research
At a dinner party last weekend, I found myself explaining how I ended up in medical school. College, job, postbac, med school. This trajectory is becoming more and more common, but it’s still a deviance from the expected path. Most medical students today still major in pre-medical studies (or, if no such major exists at the school, biology) and enter medical school the summer after their college graduation. The trend towards older medical students with more life experience is a positive one, I think, since a certain amount of maturity is unavoidable with time and a job (or am I too optimistic?).
Anyway, I have the narrative down pretty well at this point, and it includes a few caveats: well, yes, I majored in Political Science, but it was “last-ditch Poli Sci,” and no, I didn’t complete the pre-med requirements in college, but I was “halfway pre-med.” For some reason, it’s important to me that my conversation partner knows these qualifications. Perhaps I insist on them because it paints an image of a student who was “more”: more than just pre-med, more than just a PoliSci major, and more than someone who followed a path. Unfortunately, along with the “more” comes an unavoidable “less”: less sure of where I belonged, less defined in my interests, and less likely to commit to long-term projects.
This tug-of-war was already present in college, when I changed my major so often that my friends and family learned to treat my announcements much like the boy who cried wolf. “Oh, you’re a music major today? Okay, Sara.” (Top with an eyeroll.) Science, or at least chemistry, was interesting enough that I managed to get through a year of general chemistry and two quarters of organic. I must’ve made it through at least a quarter of biology in order to graduate, but I only attended one physics class before dropping it. If I was a “halfway pre-med” in terms of classes, it was also true for the most obligatory extracurricular on a prospective medical student’s application: research.
I became a veritable candy-striper, in that I carried candy around the hospital to bribe staff to answer my questions, and sometimes wore stripes.
Many pre-professional colleges provide a listing of research opportunities for undergraduates, and though at the time my college would rather close than call itself pre-professional, it was no different. Late in my first year I sent off a dozen or so emails, some to postings that hadn’t been updated in five years, and waited to hear back. It’s a time-honored tradition, the unpaid undergraduate clinical research assistant, to whom the brunt of the actual research falls: data collection. I eagerly signed on with the first principal investigator (PI) I heard back from, and became a veritable candy-striper, in that I carried candy around the hospital to bribe staff to answer my questions, and sometimes wore stripes. I saw a natural trajectory in the lab: march around the hospital doing data collection for a year or two, then ascend into the study coordinator position, at which point I would have more access to the frenetic, constantly unavailable PI and get my name on a paper or two.
It was my first research experience, and I either hated it because I was so horrible at it, or vice versa. I was grateful to have unfettered exposure to the hospital’s ICU tower, where everything was new to me and all of the doctors seemed to walk purposefully with an unobtainable air. I also had a major case of imposter syndrome, as if everyone could tell that I was just an undergraduate with a Kant paper due which, for some reason, would discount my data collection. I was certain that I didn’t belong in the hospital, that I was just getting in the way, and that one missed day of data collection wouldn’t effect the study. Of course, one day turned into many as I started using every excuse to avoid the hospital: every midterm, every “bug going around,” and every Chicago snowstorm became an apologetic email to the study coordinator.
However, along with my imposter syndrome was a strong inner monologue of my ego. “I’m not just a candy drone,” I wanted to shout, “I’m a real person!” I wanted to seize the attention of every doctor and nurse I interviewed and go off-script: “How did you end up here? Do you like working here? Did you know that I want to do this too? Are you happy?” It was a new stage, but the same less-than-more-than tug-of-war was playing out.
In any case, the coordinators, who had been in my position just a year or two earlier, were sympathetic but disinterested. I was one college student in a sea of available bodies.* They gave me an ultimatum: start showing up, or you’re out. When I took a leave of absence from college for unrelated reasons, it was all too easy to email these .edus (they were more email address than people at that point) and break the bad news that I wouldn’t be coming back to the lab. At that point, the “lab” consisted of an empty office that I returned completed surveys to — I recall two “lab meetings” in the year and a half I volunteered, though these weekly meetings with the PI were supposed to be my reward for conducting otherwise unrecognized data collection. Without regular team meetings, it felt like my work was occurring in a vacuum. Could regular meetings that lent a sense of pride and purpose to the work have tempered both my imposter syndrome and my ego? They couldn’t have hurt.
Today, my total research experience has consisted of that position and another data collection role during my post-bac, this time in an ER. I’ve come to believe that two things can make or break a research experience: interest in the project and the presence of sustained, high-quality mentorship. Granted, if there’s enough of the former then the latter may not be necessary. However, given enough of the latter, then the reverse may be true. So far I haven’t been able to find either (or perhaps “establish” is the better word, since mentorship is a two-way street). When I was young I learned from the example of my two scientist parents, perhaps to my detriment, that a true research interest should consume you. A chemist and a biologist, they both followed the route of undergrad-grad school-post-doc-national lab, where they finally met. My dad likes to joke about missing out on the 1970’s in sunny California, since everything he needed was in his underground lab. From their stories it always seemed like research was a calling, only to be pursued by those willing to commit their life to plant genetics for example, or a certain molecule. For years and years I read widely, waiting for that one topic to pop out at me and scream “This! This is what your life’s work will be!” After all, real research was only done by its committed acolytes.
In college however, something strange happened: my classmates seemed to be doing research just for the sake of…doing research. They had a completely different understanding than I did; they saw research as a tool to advance their careers, not as a declaration of love to one topic. Clearly, when I tried my hand at this, I struggled. Even into medical school, capital-R-Research remained on a pedestal in my mind. I’m now slowly working to overcome this block, to find small areas of investigation where my interest is sincere if not a lifelong commitment. And that’s okay. For while I’ll probably never stop looking for that one article stamped with “LIFE’S WORK” in big red letters to come across my desk, starting small will give me the experience I need when it does.
*To this day I believe that academic research at best does a major disservice to, and at worst, outright exploits its undergraduate foot soldiers. Across all disciplines, students are encouraged to set aside their own ideas and instead put in hours of work towards someone else’s research interests, with dangling carrots in the distance that promise a letter of recommendation, more involvement in the lab or mentorship. For every student that has a successful research experience, there are dozens like me who get discouraged and drop out. Yes, there are very real demands on the time of everyone involved in a lab that prevent them from interacting with undergrads, but short of upending the funding system of academic research, there must be a better way to engage students. Paying them for their labor would be a logical start.
