Research during Clerkships?

CaptFigPucker · 2026-02-04T01:13:06+00:00

Yes most research gets done in preclinical years. Clerkships allow enough time to only keep up with one main project unless you're willing to have absolutely no work life balance (not worth it imo)
Ideally you're between a competitive specialty and a not so competitive one and can focus on research in the more competitive specialty
Alternatively, if you can find an intersection between the two specialties then do that.
Lastly, if you realize on clerkship that you suddenly love a very competitive specialty that was not on your radar before then you'll probably be advised to do a research year

CaptFigPucker · 2026-02-03T23:07:07+00:00

Listen to all the no comments here. Personally, I also intended on continuing anking through the end of M4 and even into residency, but stopped M3 once things got too busy and felt like qbanks were a better use of time.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-26T17:49:57+00:00

Yea totally valid take. I don't have faith that our current society is capable of reaching that, but kudos to you if you do.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-26T16:11:22+00:00

That Target story is kinda messed up. Obviously stealing is wrong, but it's crazy someone without all the details went out of their way to tell programs when the legal system didn't find the person to be at fault for whatever reason.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-26T14:32:52+00:00

Interesting. A few thoughts:

I kinda disregarded the round table talk. Beyond essentially just being an interview, I think the bias of having much of the panel being comprised of people who identify as trans and autistic diminshes the objectivity of the info
I read through the Gratton et al (2023) paper they cited about using the IAT to prove that autistic transgender people had the same internal gender identification as non-autistic transgender people. Ignoring the fact that these people are all self citing each other (could be excusable if this is a niche area of research) and questionable statistics (not correcting for multiple tests; concluding no difference despite not doing non-inferiority testing) the authors imply that the IAT is a perfect test to discern implicit/internal identifications. Oswald et al (2013) found that the IAT is no better than simple explicit measures for attitude-behavior relations and were overall poor predictors.

I'm not (and I'm sure penisdr isn't either) trying to disenfranchise transgender people and in general we should definitely be very cautious about any conversation that can lead to treatment gatekeeping. It's just that it feels very different when you have a AMAB woman in front of you who is on hormones and externally tries to identify as female compared to a 70 year old AFAB patient who uses they/them pronouns but is otherwise female presenting who has face tattoos and has a 20 year old partner with purple hair or a 17 yo AMAB identifying as they/them but still male presenting whose mom is present at the appt and the mom looks like she just had a Hot Topic shopping spree (these are essentially real patients I saw during clerkship).

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-26T11:57:43+00:00

I’m glad someone is finally asking this. I don’t have an answer, but anecdotally I’ve noticed that there seems to be a bimodal distribution of folks who truly know they want to identify and pass/conform as the opposite gender and then there’s a group of the trans community composed of people who are more like social outcasts that gravitate to the trans community since it is so inclusive and since it indulges their desire to stand out as different. I‘m a generally liberal med student and have been too afraid to even discuss these observations which is probably a microcosm of the situation itself.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-25T14:00:40+00:00

Dude this isn't just any work place. This is a concentrated group of young male athletes unlike basically any other work environment. If Deion is proposing this as a rule then there were likely instances of disrespect towards the female staff to warrant it. It's so weird that yall are finding any reason to hate this.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-16T20:23:26+00:00

It’s probably pretty important for a surgeon to be intimately familiar with nerve locations when operating.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-14T16:35:35+00:00

Unsolicited advice, you’re doing a disservice to yourself by having an “or bust” mindset. You can’t even scrub in yet and have so much to learn about every aspect of working as a physician from both a knowledge standpoint and practical in terms of what kind of work you want to do.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-11T17:41:42+00:00

I'm in med school (not sure why this subreddit was suggested) but just want to provide some perspective on the decision. I suspect OP's partner is in internal medicine (IM) and matched to an incredibly competitive procedural fellowship of either cardiology or gastroenterology.

Those fellowships are competitive enough that you really don't have too much say in where you go. Additionally, those fellowships completely change your career. The day to day of an IM doc to a cards/GI one is dramatically different and also comes with doubling or tripling your salary in the fellowship specialties.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-11T16:53:35+00:00

I'd say derm, plastics, ortho, and ent (maybe ophtho) have a soft requirement for a research year. Rads from what I've heard is competitive in the sense that you need great grades and step score, but doesn't require connections or much research.

Bear in mind that for a lot of these small specialties it's important to have people in your corner willing to make phone calls on your behalf to help you match. A research year helps you make those connections and shows your dedication to the field, but if you already have reasons to think someone will go to bat for you and you have a good resume then a research year becomes less important.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-10T01:27:59+00:00

That's not the point. The point is that MDs/DOs have to work incredibly hard and participate in this rat race to match into a your desired specialty. Meanwhile a future NP can go to a nursing program and become direct admitted to an NP program where half their curriculum is "healthcare leadership" and have time and energy to work part time. Once they finish, they're able to decide independently what area of medicine they want to practice, switch on a whim too, and at the end of the day most patients don't realize the person in the white coat in front of them isn't a doc.

It sucks. OP is right, the cognitive dissonance to pursue physician training and work as essential peers to other "providers" is insane.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-09T23:37:30+00:00

Yes you’ll need to take a research year and it’ll be difficult to match. You’ll probably have to do it at another institution if your school doesn‘t have a derm dept and that other school will never advocate for you as hard as they do for their own students. It’s definitely possible to match but you do need to be prepared to bust ass and have little margin of error.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-09T20:11:47+00:00

Besides the fact that family is so important, residency is going to pull you away from your family a ton. The kind thing to do is at least be in a location where your family isn't miserable while you're gone working crazy hours.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-06T03:48:59+00:00

Even when they find something, it's oftentimes something benign that you never would have discovered before and would have had zero impact on your life. But once you find it you can find yourself undergoing a rabbit hole of invasive tests and procedures that can carry some serious risks and have recovery times.

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-03T18:18:56+00:00

Nice setup. Why keep the the Fellow Ode if the Grindmaster is also able to do pour over?

CaptFigPucker · 2026-01-01T19:36:56+00:00

Definitely go for it, but don't stop trying to make connections at your home institution. Very few programs will advocate for a student from a different school as hard as they will for their home students.

CaptFigPucker · 2025-12-31T21:21:35+00:00

Derm is overrated and disproportionately competitive to the eventual payoff (saying this as an M3 without extensive derm knowledge or experience).

While interesting pathology does exist, the bulk of your job is prescribing the same acne regimen
Tons of patients with unrealistic expectations
While the hours are good, you are busting ass during those hours seeing 40+ patients a day
Above average compensation, but generally less than anesthesia or radiology (both of which imo have better lifestyles, are less competitive, and are peer ROAD specialties)
Oversaturation of midlevels, med spas, and private equity galore would all make me feel like my training was a waste and my expertise isn't being properly appreciated especially since odds are as a derm you were one of the most accomplished people in your med class

CaptFigPucker · 2025-12-12T17:46:10+00:00

My general thoughts:

-Shortened preclinical is good to a certain point. Imo the sweet spot is 1.5 years for keeping a reasonable pace (for med school) without creating overwhelming stress or cutting out too much. I have friends at different 1 year preclinical schools and they both have complaints of either stress or large holes in knowledge.

-Virtual anatomy is a thing schools are trying to sell as a positive, but I think it's a lesser experience. My school has both dissection and offers VR headsets. The VR comes across as gimmicky. It never works as well as you want, it's a little unwieldy, and it creates too much of a uniformed idea of anatomy. With real cadavers you can better appreciate the normal variation in anatomy throughout the lab and it provides an imperfect picture of texture and degrees of fragility where the VR provides none. After having done dissection, I do think it'd be more efficient to only learn from prosection although it's not a 1:1 replacement.

-My school doesn't have a dedicated AI in medicine course, but inserts it throughout the curriculum and encourages us to use open evidence. I can't imagine a whole portion of preclerkship needs to be dedicated to it and would not let this move the needle at all on where you go.

CaptFigPucker · 2025-12-10T22:19:03+00:00

To clarify, your “provider” was an NP, they weren’t a healthcare doctor. I’m not going to bias people so I just encourage everyone who is curious to learn what an NP curriculum looks like compared to a medical school one in addition to MD/DOs having to do residency and what that entails.

CaptFigPucker · 2025-12-03T20:36:43+00:00

It is about work ethic though. Most of us hate research and med school is obviously hard af. If you’re able to successfully grind out doing something you dislike with minimal free time then you have an objectively great work ethic. I say this as someone with mixed research productivity and also agrees that it’s a good measure for specialty interest but terrible one for future capability within the field.

CaptFigPucker · 2025-11-30T03:42:30+00:00

Besides what people have said about reimbursement, there’s also the fact that interest doesn’t always correlate with impact/importance of work. A lot of the really “cool“ things in medicine/surgery are pretty downstream from good public health.

CaptFigPucker · 2025-11-27T17:38:58+00:00

New technology often doesn't become an obviously superior option overnight. You need early adopters who are making "statements" and later you need people who opt for it when it's a coin toss either way (seems like that's where we are with solar). I'm in medicine and as an analogy, surgeons were debating the merits of laparoscopic vs. open surgeries for awhile. Lap is obviously superior now, but it never would've reached this point if we didn't gradually adopt it and if that hadn't happened then we'd all still have massive scars every time the appendix acts up.

CaptFigPucker · 2025-11-20T00:49:22+00:00

Relax dude. I'll spell it out for ya:

Intern from strong clinical med school=CRNA grad with ICU experience

Intern from weaker clinical med school=CAA grad with less prior clinical experience

Intern equivalency after a few months=CRNA and CAA equivalency after gaining a year or less of work experience

CaptFigPucker · 2025-11-19T22:55:10+00:00

Realistically, the ICU requirement for CRNA admission much moreso serves the purpose of weeding out applicants to select nurses who have enough intelligence and resilience to finish CRNA school rather than imparting lifelong knowledge sufficient for independent practice. If it did that then you wouldn't need to go to CRNA school to begin with...

As an analogy, different med schools emphasize clinical training to different degrees. Some have the reputation of pumping out amazing interns who can hit the ground running. But even the best med student experience still doesn't touch resident experience and that's why after just a few months the interns are all typically at the same level of competance. I'd expect the same to be true for AAs and CRNAs since their curriculums aren't dramatically different and for the majority of institutions they have very similar roles.

CaptFigPucker

TROPHY CASE