MD PHD in grad years

[whynsgy]

I'm an MD/PhD student that's going to be separated from all things clinical for x-many years, wondering if there's anything I should be doing extra during these years to maintain some sort of competitiveness (?) and keep showing attendings/department heads that I'm actually still interested in neurosurgery.

My plan is to keep scrubbing cases every now and then, get together with residents for a few clinical research papers every so often, and go to department grand rounds/journal clubs as often as I can. 

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks guys!

[Guest]

If you go to grad school with a young hungry PI and they tell you exactly what to do every day, by the end of it you will have a bunch of smaller papers and will be very successful for nsg apps. This is the low risk route and although the PI will be on your back all the time you could technically start working on side clinical projects with nsg whenever you want.

If you pick the heavyweight PI who has very little time for you but lots of money and cool ideas, this will be higher risk but higher potential reward path. Being around a thought leader in a field will show you how to be one yourself. You will have a very high level of autonomy here, but you need to be busting your ass trying to discover/invent something and this will be extremely difficult and a lot of luck goes into it. The more work you put in, the more lottery tickets you get, so until you have the findings that you will write your dissertation about in-hand I would be putting 110% into the lab alone.

With either route the fall of your last year in graduate school is a perfect time to start working on side clinical papers with the neurosurg department as you should be wrapping up in lab and you will have a high level of autonomy, this also gives you two years to get clinical projects published.

[Guest]

(10-17-2018, 08:36 PM)Guest Wrote: If you go to grad school with a young hungry PI and they tell you exactly what to do every day, by the end of it you will have a bunch of smaller papers and will be very successful for nsg apps. This is the low risk route and although the PI will be on your back all the time you could technically start working on side clinical projects with nsg whenever you want.

If you pick the heavyweight PI who has very little time for you but lots of money and cool ideas, this will be higher risk but higher potential reward path. Being around a thought leader in a field will show you how to be one yourself. You will have a very high level of autonomy here, but you need to be busting your ass trying to discover/invent something and this will be extremely difficult and a lot of luck goes into it. The more work you put in, the more lottery tickets you get, so until you have the findings that you will write your dissertation about in-hand I would be putting 110% into the lab alone.

With either route the fall of your last year in graduate school is a perfect time to start working on side clinical papers with the neurosurg department as you should be wrapping up in lab and you will have a high level of autonomy, this also gives you two years to get clinical projects published.

I disagree with the clinical papers point. I think it is a huge waste of time, unless you are particularly interested. Focus on basic science, it is appreciated and valued by Neurosurgery programs.