The Impact of Specialty Choice on Medical Student Research

Medical school research has been shown to influence many aspects of medical students’ professional careers, including medical knowledge, medical literature evaluation, and presentation skills. Few studies have looked at the impact of research on specialty choice and vice versa. We conducted a retrospective survey study to look at the relationship of medical student research and specialty choice. We found that students entering historically competitive specialties published and presented more during medical school and during graduate medical education than students entering other specialties. We also found that students reported that their specialty choice had a greater impact on their research, than their research influencing their specialty choice. We want to conduct future studies on the factors that lead medical students towards or away from research and how medical schools can revise curricula or medical student advisement to improve participation.