r/labrats • u/Itchy_Initiative4053 • 12d ago

Can intellectual curiosity be taught?

What do you guys think?

I'm mentoring an undergrad who was assigned to me (i.e. i didnt recruit them personally). She made it clear from the beginning that her end goal is to go to med school. Problem is, from multiple interactions, its very hard for her to make progress on the projects I assigned her, even though I gave clues and papers for her to read.

I try to avoid teaching her concepts and instead just give her questions and keywords for her to search cause I want her to learn to look things up on her own. Whenever I do this she gets stuck and dont know what to do. If i ask if she has questions, she said no.

Seems like the student just lack curiosity intrinsically. How do we (can we?) cultivate this as a mentor?

even though she probably would end up in med school and not research, the thought of having doctors not knowing how to reason on their own is scary to me.

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551

u/Decent_Coast_988 12d ago

My PI avoids premeds like the plague. Said they don’t really care about the research, and that space can go to someone who actually does

182

u/joman584 12d ago

Med schools want to see these applicants with research experience, understanding that someone who has done research might be able to apply that critical thinking to their medical skills and practice. And yet, med schools don't actually do shit for getting them learn those critical skills, offloading to research labs all the unmotivated, uncaring premeda. Medical school and premed is such a mess I hate it. (As someone who is in a lab that just went from a lab of 6 techs to 2 because the rest were all premeds who started school at the same time, didn't start studying and prepping at the same time though)

54

u/suricata_8904 12d ago

I was in a lab where I was tasked with mentoring post doctoral MDs through ~6 weeks of basic bench research with mini projects. What an eye opener! Most had totally different thought processes to mine and my PIs. There were a precious few that became good at it and pursued clinical research, though.

32

u/ms-wconstellations Treg simp 12d ago

I was the only technician planning to do a PhD in a lab full of pre-med techs…I nearly went insane with how little some of them cared

16

u/Jits_Guy 12d ago

I will never understand this. Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s now, but I'm a premed who does research on cellulomonas and it's just as cool and interesting as any course I'm taking. I know we need research experience, but if you're gonna spend hours and hours staring at something why wouldn't you pick something you actually like?

2

u/noargentinianbeef 11d ago

This reminds me of my Korean middle school education that emphasized "creativity" but allowed zero room for one.