inca999 Unregistered User (9/6/00 12:35:49 am) Reply research questions Hey all, I've been reading this forum, it's been very helpful so far. Currently, I'm a second-year med student and I'm focused on orthopedics. I'm doing well, honors and a couple of high passes and usually do pretty well on standardized tests, so I'm confident I'll do okay on the boards. My question is that everyone is mentioning research, research, research. Well, I hate research -- I did a bunch of it in college as a molecular cell bio major and couldn't handle the slow pace and tediousness of it all. Instead of doing research, I was thinking of taking a couple college courses (our med school lets you take courses at the university for free) in Spanish and get as good as possible in it in the next two years. I don't know any Spanish at this point. That'd be more worthwhile to me than forcing myself to do some research for the sole reason of boosting my application. What's your thoughts on the relative strength of this vs. some research under my belt. Secondly, how honest should I be in my interviews about this? My instinct is to be pretty honest and let em know I took some courses and did something productive with my time instead of doing research, so they see I'm not a slacker. Thoughts? Jose Unregistered User (9/9/00 12:19:56 pm) Reply thought hispanics are the fastest growing minority in the us... CS Registered User (9/11/00 10:22:43 am) Reply research vs Spanish Although Spanish is certainly a useful thing to any doc, remember that most surgical research is clinical, not bench. The thought of sitting in a lab doing gel runs or whatever would bore me to tears too, you can do all sorts of neat little interesting other kinds of projects. Talk to the orthopedists (NOT the PhDs) in the department - many have fully formed ideas that just need some labor (yours) to result in a poster or presentation. Also think about stuff in anesthesiology or radiology. I did a retrospective radiographic study of the results following a not terribly common pediatric orthopedic surgical procedure. Although it's not Nature or Cell quality research (so the MD/PhDs will laugh at my N=13), I learned how to measure the acetabular angle, look for Rissers sign, know what a broken teardrop looks like etc. Plus I got a free trip to Florida, a nice rec and got to meet a bunch of the residents who are now the chiefs when I'm doing electives. Don't do stuff that bores you - displaying ennui will not serve you well - but try to find a project with a beginning and an end (often this means retrospective) where you can learn something and that increases your interest in ortho and makes you some contacts. Pero debe estudiar espanol tambien!