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.

Lately, me and many of my friends have been quite busy to regularly update this website or review its content. In order to help us continue this process of continuous professional enhancement, we need the help of our juniors, students we have been helping through this website. In case you are interested in reviewing content or compiling data for future posts of this website under my direct guidance/supervision, please let us know. You would be given a username and password for the website and your picture would be displayed with every work you do. I am sure this would also be a valuable asset for your CV like it was for mine.
The main purpose of this website was to help and guide all our junoirs, to provide them with all the necessary information that they need and to save their valuable time during medical school. If you want to help us in this noble cause, please join our hands to write more, provide more information, gather more data and present more content to them.
You can write a blog or page regarding electives/research/residency/any other thing and send it to us on umartariq58@ gmail.com. If your blog/webpage has valuable information for the medical students, it would be posted with your name(under your authorship) and you would have full access to edit/modify it. In addition your name would be added in the "list of contributors" of this website, mentioned in the Special Thanks section which can be valuable for your CV.
To write for us, please comment here and we would give you a username and password!
Best of luck! May God bless us with the "true" spirit of helping others!

You can express your views or write a testimonial by adding your comments here. Please leave your name, location, email id(optional) and designation/status at the end of your testimonial.

The following list was compiled in 2009; so the information provided might be outdated; visit the Universities' webpages to see the up-to-date and current details. Click on the name of university to open electives webpage of that university.

by Umar Tariq 

' Hope is a good thing, probably the best of all the things one could ever come across.'

 Keeping a clear vision and heart is important. There are moments when we are disappointed and dejected, when we totally loose hope but there is so much sadness in the world; for a moment consider those people who are less fortunate and less blessed than us, those poor  helpless people who cannot afford two times meals, who could not even dream of the basic necessities of life; those unfortunate people  who have lost their limbs/ their senses; even then, they all try to live life happily with a hope of better tomorrow; if they can... why can't  we?

 We are very lucky to be born with much blessed minds, bodies and souls than many other people of the world but that puts lots of extra  responsibilities on us for the ones less fortunate and we cannot fulfil those responsibilities if we lose hope in life.

The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure. Grief, sorrow, fear and apprehensions...all are integral part of life; they make us realize the 'true' reality of happiness and success, thus adding to the beauty of life. Life without fears and apprehensions would have been dull. They are like horror movies, breath-taking rides that many of us enjoy. Infact, we enjoy the feeling of fear. If we never fail, we never live...