How to get Research?
By Dr. Ahsun Riaz
FORMAL APPLICATION:
There are centers with a proper research fellowship application. NIH and good universities have amazing programs. The problem is that you compete against the same US medical students who have no visa issues etc. and have planned a year beforehand for this research year. (They usually take a year off during medical school or work during their summer vacations.) If you can plan so much in advance, then I recommend that you try this out. Google the websites of these institutions and send out the required documents. I tried this but was not able to get any positive replies.
BACKDOOR APPLICATIONS:
The other way is hard but has paid off. The procedure I used is as follows,
1- Go to US News online. Find the top 30 US medical schools in terms of research.
2- Go to the schools’ websites and find the department you want to do research in.
3- Find faculty members with phone numbers and e-mail addresses. (Make a note of them somewhere.)
4- E-mail them with a general body text and a paragraph specific to the attending’s field of interest with your resume attached
5- Try to mail at least 100 people (20-25 will reply, 3-5 will have a positive tone, 1-2 will have a really positive tone)
Point number 5 is the most variable and depends on multiple factors. Luck and timing help a lot (timing as in applying well beforehand)
What you could do is as follows,
- Please try to search the attending you are going to work with on PubMed and make sure that he/she has at least 10 publications per year as a corresponding author. This will ensure that you will get a chance to get published multiple times.