Research is a great thing to get yourself into, as a pre-med student, or further on, but especially as a pre-med student. Research really teaches you to think critically and look at a research topic/problem from different angles.
Research also helped me learn more in-depth about a topic that I couldn't get from the classroom. For example, I've learned a ton about hematological malignancies (albeit on the molecular level) from working in a lab that studies it and from keeping up with the literature that keeps coming out.
While a lot of labs I've worked in were basic, it is pretty fun reading clinical journals and making connections between what you're studying on the molecular level to what's going on in a patient. It's sort of like "You study protein X, and high levels of protein X are good. Patients with disease Y have lower protein X levels than healthy individuals, and these new drugs being tested help boost protein X levels, and these are the results."
Research though, takes a pretty long time for you to see meaningful results and to get a paper published. As an undergrad, you're not likely to get first author on paper, or see a really big stride in science being made in your lab, but contributing to science is a pretty good feeling.
Working in labs has exposed me to a lot of different biochemical techniques relevant in medicine (Western blots, immunohistochemistry), so that's been useful. However, I'm not really pipetter and I don't plan on doing an MD/PhD or being a research MD so I'm going to be leaving that field and concentrating on being a good clinician.
If you love science AND medicine though, I'd definitely recommend that you look into an MD/PhD or becoming a doctor who does both research and clinical duties.
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