The Lord is truly too good to me. When I was interested in General Surgery or Urology I had started a research project on pediatric kidney transplants so that I could hopefully get a research publication out of it. The attending that I hooked up with was super nice and basically let me run full steam with the project, allowing me to be first author on it. I was a little scared because previously I had really never taken research seriously, and therefore I had never truly known how meticulous you had to be to get through a project, but I basically did everything by myself including the data collection, the database creation, meeting with the statistician, telling him what I think we needed, taking the results, and writing a good abstract with associated graphs. I had submitted this abstract to the American Journal of Transplant and yesterday I got this letter:
The attending I worked with on the project told me that how the process works is that my abstract is published in a supplement to the journal and that I should make a poster for my project and present it at the meeting. But he also said to have the full completed paper ready for submission by the time that the meeting starts because once I present my poster, the journal has a greater chance of accepting the full paper once I’ve actually presented it. So my hope is that I get a full journal article publication out of this. I have to admit that I am really not a research guy, but there is something very special about seeing your name on a published article, and I can see how that thrill from seeing your name there can drive you to try to pump out more and more papers….of course in addition to the drive of just contributing to the field of medicine :-). I wish that this paper was an ortho paper but it isn’t, so I am currently working on 3 other projects, one of which I hope will get published before I start the application cycle, but you never know how things like that will work out.
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