We took a break from our Finding Summer Opportunities series to highlight some webinars, summer programs, and events, but we’re back to hearing from our undergrads. Susannah Daggett talks about her two summer research experiences. (One of them, Summer Scholars, has a March 4 deadline!)
I’ve had two summer experiences during my time at Tufts that have influenced my trajectory as a pre-health student. Between sophomore and junior year, I was part of the Summer Student Research Program at Maine Medical Center. I found this internship by searching for opportunities for undergrads at various colleges and medical centers near my hometown. The application deadline is really early (January), so it was important to plan ahead and ask for letters of recommendation from professors before winter break.
At Maine Med, I worked in the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. I was paired with a researcher who was also an MD and gave me lots of advice and mentorship along with everyone else at the center. I worked multiple projects at once, conducting literature searches, writing drafts of scientific papers, designing surveys for data collection, and even surveying people at a baseball game.
The program also has weekly seminars where the various PIs that all of the interns are paired with present their work, so there was a lot of opportunity for networking and meeting current medical students. At the end of the summer I got to present one study I worked on, which looked at the influence of individualized risk estimates for colon cancer on peoples’ perceived risk and intent to screen.
Working as part of a medical institution and within a cohort of other premedical students (who were mostly doing basic science “bench” research) was a great experience and gave me a lot of opportunities to connect with doctors, PIs, and medical students. I really enjoyed not doing bench research though, and I found the topics I looked at — health psychology, risk communication, and public health — even more interesting. Being a non-science major and someone interested in psychology and community health doesn’t mean that you have to miss out on awesome internship programs. There is always something that combines medicine with whatever discipline you’re interested in, and it makes you a more interesting candidate!
Susannah presenting her Summer Scholars research
Between my junior and senior years, I was part of the Tufts Summer Scholars program and conducted my own research project that looked at patient-provider relationships in a pediatric practice. This application process was pretty intense and requires a lot of preplanning and coordinating with a professor that will serve as your mentor over the summer. Some professors may seek out undergrads to work on a project, and some students may seek out a professor to support a project they’ve come up with — the key is to communicate about it ahead of time. I applied with a research faculty member who was connected to research I’d worked on on-campus as a sophomore.
Summer Scholars gives you all the tools you need to basically have free reign over your own research endeavor; you get a stipend for the summer plus a $1000 budget to spend on your research. You’re only responsible to your own timeline that you’ve set up with your mentor. There’s even free housing and a meal plan available if you have financial aid.
Summer Scholars was challenging for me because it is so flexible and open-ended. I learned a lot about my own work habits as an independent researcher who requires more structure to get things done. I also had to advocate for myself a lot within the lab I was placed in. With freedom over the direction of my own project and without a lot of supervision (depending on your relationship with your professor), I definitely improved my communication skills.
In the end, it was awesome to be able to present my own project and have complete ownership over it — something that’s hard to get as an undergrad when you can often feel like a cog in someone else’s research machine. The flexibility of the program also gave me the opportunity to network with other researchers and land an internship at a program I was working with this past fall semester.
Though different in structure, both of my summers doing research gave me insight not only into my academic interests but also myself as a learner and someone interested in medicine. Some of the most important skills I learned were the more intangible, like professionalism, organization, and advocacy, and the best takeaways from both programs were the advice and mentorship I got from people I worked with along the way.
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