Any student who has ever thought about getting into medical school knows that it requires more than just grades. Sure a 4.0 GPA helps out with the application, but with more and more intelligent individuals getting in on the medical scene, it takes a bit more to stand out above the crowd. One of the obvious choices for pre-med students is to go out in search of undergraduate research. Any application can glisten with the words "Undergraduate experience", but there are many hurdles that must be overcome before you can even get into any research.
Getting noticed from a pool of 2000+ students is possibly the hardest part of the research opportunity. Of course, there are those students who naturally excel in their classes, and you may be one of them, but for many others it takes a large amount of PR with both the students and the faculty. Attending extra sessions outside of class, meetings with your professor, study groups, etc, are all necessary to get your name out there to be noticed by the higher faculty. You have to prove that you have the knowledge that has been taught and the determination and capacity to learn whatever may be required in a specific research department. If you work hard and have the luck, you may just get in, but even still there are other hurdles ahead.
As an undergrad in a science field, we remain as the lowest of the low. We have less class experience, less lab experience, and are certainly less knowledgeable than our graduate counterparts. As a result, most primary investigators (lead research PhDs) of labs will naturally choose the graduate students over the undergrads for the complex and even the not-so-complex experiments. Undergraduates are often seen as "cheap labor" that are good for cleaning around the lab, washing dishes, and taking monotonous weighings of various experiments. Though this is not the case with all colleges, many require that you take a year or more to prove to the higher staff that you are capable of taking on larger projects.
So it's been a little over a year and the faculty has noticed that you are a hard worker in the lab and that you have the determination to stick to a specific task. You get your own experiment with your own protocols, or you manage to squeeze in under the direction of a graduate's experimental set. At this point you are in...or not.
As undergrads, we often take our instructions directly from the one in charge, so the experiment we may be doing is not often our own. As often times happens in the lab, the primary investigator (PI) has direct say over who gets what credit in any lab setting. As a result, we may not get due credit for what we have done. Credit may go to the PI, it may go to the graduate student above you, or you may be one of twenty names in a submitted journal. While all this is just enough to add a bit of flare to any application, it may not be enough to give you that glisten that sets your application above the others.
So what does it take, then, to get that necessary push forward in an application. Well in all honesty, it depends on the school that you go to. Some schools push undergraduates to participate in research to get the experience necessary, while others set undergrads to the side in favor of more experienced students. If you're future college carrier depends on what you do and how you do it in your undergrad years, take the time to scout out which college is right for you and which will take the time to give you the experience that you need to succeed.
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Our school allows undergrads to do research, but usually they are assigned to a grad student. I have two under me right now, so I have the ultimate say as to what work they get to do. I usually teach them a few things, and if I feel like they are careful, ask questions when they don't know something, and are trustworthy I'll assign them a less crucial part of my own project. Otherwise, I'll probably either let them make solutions for me or work with someone else. I have to pay tuition for every semester that I am conducting research, so I can't afford to let someone that I don't trust take on part of my project. Sadly, most of the students that come in only want to go to med school and don't care about research, so they aren't very careful.
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