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I'll start. Um Welcome everyone. Um Nice to meet you all. I'm Jessica and I'll introduce myself in the next slide. But I'm going to be talking today about how to get research experience as a medical student um and where to start and how to actually finish and hopefully end up with a publication or a prize. So um just a bit about me and my journey so far. I'm a UK medic question in my fourth year. I took a gap here before getting into medical school because I um didn't know a lot about the process, didn't realize how competitive it was and didn't do the best in my interviews. So um did physics, chemistry, biology and maths a level um in the UK, which is what we do before we go to university. Um I then worked in the NHS for a while, which is our national health system here and then did some experience in the Dominican Republic finally got into medical school when I reapplied and then I went to Cambridge for a year to do a Masters in Psychiatry. So involved in research for a year there. And then I'm currently back at medical school um to complete my last two years. So an inter collation is a year out to do another degree and I decided to do it there. Um So how did I get to Cambridge? First of all, is that during my pre clinical years at King's, um I got involved in a lot of things to do with the curriculum. So students selected components like S S E S um got my SSC published um did a systematic review for my scholarly project, which I did in year three, um and 12 s a prizes in my second year of med school. Um because I like writing. So I'm going to talk a little bit about essay competitions and how valuable they can be. Not just in preclinical years, but anytime in med school because, you know, essay writing is just something that you can become like quite good at easily, more easily than you think. And I'll be talking a little bit about what it takes to write an essay and then um a bit about publication and where to find opportunities. So the first thing um I wanted to focus on when it comes to writing a good essay is critical appraisal. So um critical appraisal is not, is to be critical of the literature, your reading and it doesn't mean to criticize in a negative way, but instead question the information and opinions in the article. Um So you're gonna be asking yourself how do we know this is this true in every case or just in this instants, what do these results actually tell us? Are they clinically relevant or are they relevant in general? Um And then this can help you evaluate its overall reliability objectively. So you're supposed to be doing this from an objective point of view. And what I like to do to briefly praise literature is asked, is it crap um currency? When was it published? Relevant? How important is the information to your study or your essay? Questions? Objectives Authority. Who is the author? And what are their credentials? Is it a peer reviewed journal? Um Did it have a supervisor? So usually the supervisor will be the last author who is the most senior person who oversaw the study. Um How reliable is the information? Does it lack citations or some of the links broken is inaccurate? Another thing too, it be really um like no, like make sure that you look out for as well. Is that um some publications will be removed in Iraq Tums? So they've had an error in them, so they've been removed and then been republished. Um Has it been withdrawn? Um has it been um has, is there an addendum because there was an error in it? So look out for all those things as well and finally, the purpose? So is it a well balanced independent piece of research or is it intended to sell a product or idea, so be very, very of the conflict of interest statement which every journal published in a peer review articles, journal should have. Um that will tell you whether it was funded who it was funded by. Um And why and how, how like where the conflicts of interest might be for the authors. So I decided to include an example of um some the publication for my S S E sorry, that this is a bit small. But if you do zoom in, we can go through the methodology of my S S E and then a paragraph that you could write if you were critically appraising what I've written. So critical appraisal, obviously, we've gone through crap. This study was published in 2021. Um We're looking at vitamin B 12 and we want to know whether ethnicity influences it. So the title matches our, our study. So it's relevant authority. I wouldn't say I have the most authority, but the last author is the lead of a lab at ST Thomas's Hospital. So you can be quite confident that things were done um correctly. Um It's published in a peer reviewed journal. Um and um purpose, the purpose is to look at patient's in a primary care setting and see whether ethnicity influence between B 12. Now, what you want to then do is look at the methods, how was the research actually conducted? So you want to first look at the study design and sampling So in my study, um it was a cross sectional study. So it was taken at one point in time. So that's a snapshot of those patient's in primary care. At that time, there's benefits and disadvantages to that. I mean, the benefits are for this study. We just wanted to look at patterns. Um We weren't making any clinical judgments that, you know, every black person is going to have this B 12 or every Asian person is going to have this B 12. We just wanted to summarize patterns we were seeing. But if you wanted to make those kind of conclusions, you'd obviously have to take samples from points of time or you would want to do a randomized controlled trial. Your control group might be white and your um experimental group might be other ethnicities. So think about that because not every study is perfect. But if it suits what they're trying to say and they're not making any wild conclusions from it, you can be quite happy with that. Um Is the can the sampling technique lead to bias? So you've got to look at the distribution of patient's or people they had in their study. In my study, I had 69% female, which is not the perfect 50 50 um which could lead to bias. Maybe females have higher B 12 or maybe they have lower B 12. We know that for example, in pregnancy, women are taking folate, even if they want to conceive, they take folate, that has an impact on B 12. So just be thinking that through and check in their limitations, whether they've mentioned that the median age was 50 which is a good spread of ages because that means that the middle age was 50 which is nice. Um And were the individuals of most interest um able to least likely to participate um or unable to give consent? So what this means is that in some studies, for example, I've done studies on mental health, some people with the worst mental health actually not want to take part in a study or a survey about mental health. It can be quite triggering. Um They're very hard to reach. Um So you've got to keep that in mind, you know, is this sample going to be representative of a particular disease you may be looking at and because we weren't looking at a condition, we were just looking at patterns of vitamin B 12. Um whether people were invited or not, didn't depend on their disease status. Um And what is the sample size? So in this study, I had almost 50,000 patient. So you're thinking, wow, nice big sample size. What they're saying is probably true. Um The measures. So this is quite um well done in papers, I would say when you're reading online. Um what measures did they use to? For example, in this, in my paper measure B 12. Well, we did it in the lab and we used a certain machine. Every paper published in a peer reviewed journal should say what measures they used if you're having a survey, what questions did you ask? They might even enclose a copy of the survey at the in the appendix. Um How did they measure cancer rate? You know, did they do MRI is, did they do this? So make sure that you're noting these things down um and checking that they had ethical approval and whether the data was collected retrospectively and they're analyzing it now or they collected it as they went along or they're looking into the future. So think about prospective versus retrospective data. Third thing analyses, there's a statistical analysis section of every peer review paper which is really nice. All of these papers follow the same sort of structure. Um So find that section and write down a few notes about what you understand about it. You don't need to know all the stats. Um But did they use a large sample size? Did they use statistical software? Did, what were the stats appropriate for the paper? So, um if there isn't a bell curve, which means that the data was completely and perfectly spread, then really they should be using things like um medians and um mediums and intercourse, our ranges, but majority of papers, which means and standard deviations, that's fine. Um But just make sure that you do a bit of extra research and look into what stats are actually appropriate for that paper being looked at um and age, gender and ethnicity. So what was made up in their sample as you kind of mentioned before the demographics? Confounder as well? Confounder is like aged gender and ethnicity. Did they account for those or did they just show you the unadjusted values and then look at the value of the results. Are they generalize a ble is what I've said in this paper, generalize, able to the entire population or are there some limitations to that? And what I said here is that to some extent, due due to the 50,000 patient's I analyzed in this paper and the fact that it was in a London primary care setting um with an ethnically diverse sample, a lot of these results can be generalized. But um, it is just South London, it is just primary care. We don't know what this might look like in secondary care in hospitals. We don't look, no, look what this may look like in particularly Children. So you've got to bear those things in mind and levels of attrition did this wasn't relevant for this paper. But if you're looking at a paper that conducted a survey, how many people didn't follow up, that survey didn't participate in follow ups? Or if you're looking at an RCT, how many patient's didn't make it till the end? And why for that intervention? Because then you'd be questioning whether it's actually effective. Um And in conclusion, make sure that the authors have presented no new information and all of this information that they've said so far should be sunrise quite nicely in the conclusion that you can read and understand if you don't understand the conclusion. Alarm bells should be going off that this paper is probably not sure what they found and it might not be clinically relevant. So if we were going to summarize all of that in a few paragraphs, um I've put an example here. So you'd want to introduce the paper and kind of list a few facts that it had. So establishment of reference interval specific for certain ethnicities may be of benefit. A large case study of primary care patient's and you can put the number that they looked at in brackets suggests that there is a need for ethnicity based reference ranges for serum, vitamin B 12. Since higher concentrations were found in black patient's compared with Asian and white patient's and make sure you cite the paper that you've got that from the paper that you critically appraised. However, physiologic states such as pregnancy dire and medications may alter vitamin B 12 directly or indirectly, which were not accounted for in the study and we'll have confounding effects on vitamin B 12 status. So you've got to talk about the limitations. No study is perfect. In addition, although a diagnostic gold standard for vitamin B 12 blood levels has yet to be found, the key functional markers such as all these things here, we're not measured for these patient's. So, in this particular study, vitamin B 12 can be done with the blood test, but you can actually get specific enzyme markers that will tell you more about whether somebody's truly got high B 12 and why they may have a disease. We do not know this. We just had the patient numbers and their blood test results, which we took B 12 from. So, um therefore, it is unknown as to what extent the difference it's seen between ethnicities were driven by enzyme abundance or actual observed differences. And then you can talk about the rest of the literature. There is not much literature on this topic. Nevertheless, this evidence is consistent with other literature which suggests that black people have high B 12 because of their genetic makeup. And this is where you should be citing other studies you've read. Okay. So you're going to critically appraise the main study of interest and then you're going to back up your points with other studies, try and fit it into other literature, which is really nice because in the journal article, it is likely they've done that for you have a look at some of the things they referenced and see if it actually makes sense. Um So I hope I haven't overloaded you there, but that's just an example of how to critically appraise methodology. And how to actually summarize that you do not need to write, study design. An example in measures everything focus on what is maybe relevant to your essay or your research project and try and tie it all up in one or two paragraphs. So um essay competitions, um the Communist way to win a national prize as a medical student is through an essay competition. Um Most of them are offered through the Royal um colleges and many charities. And um I really suggest everyone follows the new Royal College um Med Students page. Um If I'm not, I think it's open to everyone. You don't have to be a UK student, but they post really great opportunities and talks that happen online that we might get you a bit more excited about research and help you with networking as well. And I also obviously recommend my blog post um on how to research different essay competitions with a bit more of my tips on how to write something that really piques your interest and the readers. Um what I would say is you don't need to be entering five S A competitions a year. Um But if you are someone who thinks you're not good at writing and thinks your tear about writing, I actually dare you and encourage you to enter just one competition if you know what you may not win, but the least you will get his feedback if you ask and you realize that you become less and less scared of writing essays and it is really good practice. Honestly, writing gets better with practice and patience. Um So writing a good essay. So before we go into Sure, I understand, sorry, my apple watch listening to everything I'm saying. So, um before we get infrastructure in your essay first, what I recommend is looking for a subject that piques your interest. If you absolutely love pediatrics, literally go on Google and type in pediatric essay competitions because you've already got an interest in that subject is probably going to bolster your CV. And you're gonna find it enjoyable too. Right? Once you've done that, you've got to spend the appropriate time planning your essay when you're entering a competition, try and treat it as if it's an assignment. If your assignments in a month, you should kind of be starting to write it with that month, given to you. So you have time to make it actually good quality. So I took at least a month to write both of my essays um for the competitions that I want and I treat these as if they were going to be examined. And um the longer the essay, obviously, the bigger the price. So if it is 5000 words, you probably could get more money or it's going to be published in a, in a journal. Um But there's equally the ones that I want. One of them was 1500 words and it got published. So I personally think short essays are nice and easy too, right? Um Plan your ideas early make spider diagrams. Um write down notes on what you could talk about and begin compiling a list of relevant references that will back up your points. Um And then you can start writing. Um what I want you to do before you start writing is really read that question over and over again. Um Right, the question out on a piece of paper and highlight specific words of the question and draw arrows out. Um I think about what you can write about. Some essay questions will even give you points to cover. And if you don't adequate, adequately cover those points, you're unlikely to win. So they want you to write creatively and succinctly about the topic and make sure it's well Reese searched. So the most important thing is that you answer the question and have something interesting to say. Um I've lost a lot of s a well not lost, but I've not one, a lot of essay competitions I've entered about eight. Um And one of the feedback I've always got is that you kind of just summarized literature. You didn't really give us anything new, you didn't give us any solutions to the problems you spoke about or you didn't put forward any unique ideas. Um And when I started doing that is when I actually one so structure. So a basic s a three parts to it, especially if it's between 1000 1500 words. You've got your introduction where you're going to have the, you're going to introduce the topic, you're gonna definitely summarize what is already know about, known about it. But you're gonna give context and highlight significant parts of the literature, but also the gaps. Where do the gaps, where are the gaps? What is not yet answered and how does that relate to your question? So if it's asking you, I'll show you an example on the next page of the essay I did um, what can surgery learn from other high performance disciplines was a question I got asked. You're going to summarize what high performance discipline is. You're going to summarize what surgeries learn already and then you're going to summarize what surgery has yet to learn. What are the parts of surgery that are not quite doing so well? Is it that patients are not having good outcomes? Is it that more and more advanced equipment is being used? Is it that patient's are multi morbid going into surgery now? So it's not the perfectly healthy young patient. It's patient with diabetes, COPD, obesity. How are we managing them in surgery? So you've really got to do your extra reading here. And once you've highlighted those gaps, you're setting the foundations for the rest of the essay in the body. Each paragraph should have one main idea introduced and then backed up by a few references. I really like subtitles. I, I've used subtitles in every essay I've written. I think they're catchy. I think they sign post the reader two different sections. They do take up a few words, but I think it really adds something unique to your writing and I'll show you an example of it on the next slide. But they're a really nice way to break up content and try to be unique and, and offer your own thoughts and solutions like I mentioned before in each of those um paragraphs and then your conclusion, the last paragraph of your essay, you want to summarize what you said, what you've spoken about in a few sentences but try not to repeat what you said in the introduction. Um You can summer, you should be really summarizing the body and remember, do not introduce any new ideas here. So this is just a few clips of S A um that I submitted. Um I had my introduction and I talked about three ideas. The thing is with the 1500 word essay. I wouldn't do more than three ideas. Um They asked what hyper, what surgery could learn from other high performance disciplines. So I chose aviation formula, one elite sport. There were so many others. I think the runner ups chose fast food restaurants. Um Another high performance disciplines like that and have their own definitions for high performance disciplines. But I wanted to focus on three main ideas. And as you can see, um, for my main, for the introduction, I kind of spoke about how they were all different, but they were all high performance discipline. Um, they each had the potential for catastrophic failure but they had nearly error free performance. So they designed systems to ensure that they were very minimal mistakes, which is what surgery wants to achieve, obviously. Um And then I spoke about the systems approach, which I was going to talk about in the rest of my essay and that surgery needs to learn how to reduce human error and improve performance. I spoke about how the cockpit and the operating room are similar and some things they could adopt from the aviation industry. I spoke about the surgeon and the professional sports person, you know, being coached and how surgeons in the UK don't have coaches. Um once you go through the training program and it's kind of like your left to your own devices. But the reality is doctors and surgeons never stop learning. And coaching could be a really valuable tool to help them be better and then formula one and it's contributions to surgery. So um formula One has already changed the way surgery is done. Um The Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is one of the biggest pediatric hospitals in the UK. Um actually learn a lot from the Ferrari team from Formula one. They came into the hospital and gave them a whole talk about everything and they have like this lollipop man methodology where in the surgical room they go through everything they say, stop. What are we doing? Kind of similar to the huge surge who surgical safety checklist? So just those catchy subtitles already make you want to read this. They link with the introduction and then a conclusion to summarize everything. Yeah. Um and I wanted to touch on something really important when it comes to writing. And that is paraphrasing. Um academic writing is built on a lot of paraphrase material, but it's really important you learn how to do this correctly. So paraphrasing basically means putting someone else's words into your own instead of quoting them directly, but you do need to still reference them. Okay. So we're going to do this throughout all of our careers and it's, it makes up journal publications, nobody is necessarily writing everything from scratch and everything is created and new, they are billed off of pre existing ideas, rewriting them in their own way. And then also saying this is how I'm taking it further. So there's not actually a lot of pressure to come up with this new invention and you have to write a publication about this. It can literally just be using pre existing ideas to springboard, another one, another idea that is your own. Um So why and what do you need to paraphrase? Um First of all, when you're paraphrasing, you need to have a goal in mind. Um And this could be to inform the reader. So you may have to paraphrase some findings that are important in the literature and provide background to your project. You might want to argue or support your point. So you might have to paraphrase another authors, argument and their reasoning and how it's similar to what you're trying to say. You might want to emphasize with your reader and paraphrase, paraphrase the conclusion of a paper to get across significant findings. So I want to emphasize that mental health is a really terrible issue for young people. I might want to paraphrase what the government have said about mental health in young people and what the research shows and then to critique. Um and that's going back to our critical appraisal. You have to paraphrase the overall message of a research article you read and its limitations and you've got a critique that read around the topic. So um if you will usually find paragraphs of writing in journal articles and you need to read it so many times to, to understand it and that's normal. But what might help is actually reading above and below that paragraph to understand what the context of this work is and write down what you've understood because you can use this as an outline for your final piece. But I really recommend, I know people say read the abstract and you don't have to read the whole paper, read the abstract, but really pick out parts of the paper that are relevant to read. You definitely should be reading the conclusion. You definitely should be giving the introduction at least a little bit of a read. So you get a better idea of what the topic is all about and statistical analysis at least give that section a brief skim through to ensure that okay. Their methods are making sense to me. I understand what this project is all about and identify keywords and phrases. What main ideas are you trying to get across and draw out these important points um and write them in your own words. So if you are trying, if I'm trying to look at mental health is being big problems for young people. I may want to look for keywords like prevalent mortality, morbidity, health costs, educational attainment, life outcomes because these are some of the things I'm going to try and use in my paper because I want to talk about the fact that you know, this is the prevalence of mental health, this is what it's doing to young people and these are the life outcomes they're having and I need to paraphrase other resources to do that. So honestly take advantage of opportunities. The most common way to um get opportunities. I am a big Google fan. Just Google literally Google things are interested in projects are interested in essay competitions. The most common way to present any work you've done is a conference. Even if you don't have anything to present, really implore you go to a conference and the best thing about it is choose something you're interested in. Again, literally type in um pediatric neurosurgery conference, um pathology conference, there's something for everyone. And even if you don't have anything to present, go there to network, go and attend it, see what the other researchers like, what other students are doing and what professionals are doing in the career that you want to have and then you'll be very inspired to then go and submit work to the next conference. Um Almost every medical society at your university will run a national undergraduate student conference. And this could be a great starting point for submitting an abstract, which I'm going to talk about soon. Um You submit an abstract before you present your poster. So when you're submitting to conferences, you're not actually submitting your poster, you're submitting your abstract, which is a 250 word summary of what your projects all about. And it doesn't always have to be re research. You could have done a systematic review. You could have done a meditate Auriol. Some conferences will want original research. But guys that sse that scholarly project that you've put to bed and you're just so glad is over, bring it up, bring it back from the dead, submit that abstract to somewhere and you'll be surprised at the replies you get Um and you can submit the same abstract, multiple conferences. So why not take that opportunity? Get about four or five presentations on your TV. And you've already demonstrated an interesting research without having to do as much work as you're probably thinking to yourself. Um As, as I mentioned before, with the Annals of medicine and Surgery, that was a publication from an essay prize and that's a nice certificate to have. Um I was the winner of another essay competition about how should adolescent health services change by 2040 to better accommodate young people. Um I got the highest mark in my S S C which was nice. Um And I presented this to the dean of my medical school um to get some extra money because he was like, you know, you used S P S S and I commend you for that. And um yeah, even things that are available at your uni so this principle global leadership award was um only available to students in their second year and it was a residential trip um where we got all these talks from leaders like politicians, um medical C E O s and just honestly, people from all different sorts of fields and I was just interested in leadership and said, why not go? And I got a little certificate for it. So honestly, I think what a lot of medical students do is they underestimate themselves. They think that you have to have published this many papers will be this amazing at writing. And I'm talking as someone who had no experience of research before I went to medical school. Um I did English amounts like everybody else at school. I do enjoy writing, but I just decided to enter, enter essay competitions when I saw a friend win one and I was like, you know, what, if she can do it? So can I, and I want you to think that I'm not trust me, I'm nothing particularly special or there's no particular amount of hours that I put into this. It was literally just having that self belief to have ago um and go into it with no expectations. And then if you win, it's even, it's even a better feeling and you'll be surprised at how little amount of people are submitting to conferences or submitting to essay competitions, something you're particularly interested and passionate about may not be what the next medical question is. And that's what I love about medicine. Um Just, I don't know what your like favorite specialty is, but I'm sure that like, there's an essay competition for it. What, what do you enjoy? So I think I resonate with you a lot because um in my last, I just did an elective in plastic surgery. And then my wife was telling me about how he had an audit for me to do, but it was just like a really small project. And I was like, okay. Sure. I'll do it. And then I completed it and represented in like a week within the department. And he was like saying, it's not, it's not going to get any price, it's not gonna get any competitions and stuff. And then I just go to Royal College of Medicine and then I saw like a plastic surgery section and I just submitted to that and then actually get a poster presentation out of it. So I think it was brilliant. I mean, amazing and congrats on that as well. And the thing is sometimes doctors will underestimate as well. Like they've given you a project or they've given you some work and they're like, let's not rest too much hope on it. We'll see where it goes. But actually you've got to take the initiative guys, um when it comes to stuff in your curriculum as well, student selected components, any research that you've got to do as part of your curriculum, I really recommend in that first email when you're introducing yourself or getting to know your supervisor. I would like to get this published. I would like to take this further. Don't be afraid to say that, be confident, show up, be present and, and give it your best effort and I promise you that supervisor will help you. Um I hope with that there's some that are not as good, but I, I would like to believe that every supervisor who signs up to do this sort of stuff for medical schools is willing to help. And I've never had a bad experience. They've always been like, you know what, since you want to get it published, let's try and get high quality level. Um and they'll take you more seriously. So honestly, don't be afraid to say some, some other places you can find opportunities. So as I mentioned, societies, conferences go to them if you're not ready to present anything. That's mainly for like the 1st and 2nd years. I'm not expecting you to have any research. I was literally just attending conferences. I was interested in um social media. Like I said, the Royal Stock Med students, Instagram page, they literally post talks and essays, um essay competitions and like the deadlines coming up all the time. And guys, I'm not even kidding. There's an essay competition for everything, somewhat even 500 words, you can do that in a text. So, um yeah, you can definitely go for those social media. I've just said that progress with Jess my website. Um I have a career building section where I do update with research, internships, essay competitions um and other opportunities that I think are really good for developing your career as a medic beyond just your curriculum. Um And then obviously your curriculum sse scholarly projects literally reaching out to supervisors. Um The last thing I would say that I didn't include in this slide is a cold email. Um June I'm not sure how you arrange your elective, but I've had to cold email so many doctors and said, look, I'm all the way here in the UK and I really want to come and, and shadow you from my elective across, across the world. Will you take me going to pub med articles? And the first author always has their email message them, see what they're up to see if they've got a project that you're interested in. And I guarantee especially when they see you're a medical student, they'll at least respond and say, look, can't, can't help you this time, but they will respond. But you won't know if you don't try journal. I don't know how you got plastic surgery, electives. Insane. Actually, actually, actually, it was arranged by medical school, but I resonate a lot of the cold email thing because I do that a lot as well since like early years, medical school, like 90% of the time you were just getting not, but you know, miracles would happen and I truly believe in it. Yeah. Keep cold. You, I think you basically cold emailed me. Well, we, you messaged me or linkedin and we'd never met each other before. But I was like, of course, why would I not, this would be a great opportunity. So you never know what might come out of it. And not just you don't have to go for the consultants or the attendings. You can go for a fellow medical student um in their final year or a junior doctor. And I promise you they will be willing to help majority of people on medicine are not those saboteurs that, that we think they are, they are willing to help and like pull up the ladder to help you get involved in projects too. So academic posters um as I mentioned before, you've got to submit an abstract. Um this will help readers get an idea of what your papers about. So they can decide whether to read the full paper. It prepares them to follow detailed information and analyses that will go with your research. And um it will be, it will prepare help readers remember key points from your paper and this will usually be judged by clinicians against some criteria. So um if the conferences has a certain theme, it has to meet that theme, it has to be this many words. Um it has to do this, this and this and then if accepted, you'll get an email and they'll ask you to present as an oral presentation and do a power point like I am today or you'll be asked to do a poster. Um And then uh there's usually a prize for the best presentation, best poster. And even if you don't get that prize, you will always get a certificate for participation and being there. And actually presenting your post are standing by your poster and fielding questions from people. So it's a win, win once you get accepted. Um And the last um these are some tips, I think I've seen a few messages in the chat which you've been sorting um Gyn. But yes, you will get all the slides. These are some must have for posters. Um Just really nice things that you like a checklist that you should really be ticking off. You want to have your title, you want to have a short day background to your project. So a little introduction methods, results conclusion and references. Um I will say about references. You don't always need to have references if your information is quite well known. So remember you're only referencing things that people wouldn't necessarily know about. So if you really are tight for space, I've got posters accepted that had no references on them and that was fine. Um These are two kind of posters that I've submitted and you will get these slides, but this is just a visual representation of those papers. So my my poster on the right, I'm sorry, this is so small. Um This is from an E book E book that I wrote. So I screenshot the graphics and um try to fit them on the slides. But if you zoom in, I'm sure it's fine. Uh The poster on the right has my reference has been referenced for example, but the poster on the left didn't need it. Um try and have a few try to make the diagrams the biggest feature of the poster. I actually think my poster on the right had way too much text. Um So I probably wouldn't do like my poster on the right was done early in the my host on the left. So you over time, you will get better at posters and also you will change up the design for different conferences, which can be quite fun. Um I do make all my posters on Power Point doesn't have to be difficult. This doesn't take long, I promise you and um get your supervisor to have a look over it before you actually present at the conference. So the publication timeline is the last thing I wanted to cover because I know I do get a lot of questions about this and this is kind of like not talked about medical school whatsoever unless you have a sit down talk with your supervisor. So um the publication timeline, I would give yourself a year, a year or two, a year and a half to just from the beginning to the end of a publication of a journal article. And that is aspirational because this 3 to 6 months of writing up your manuscript cover letter and submitting it could take your year. Medical school is medical schooling and you need to pass your exams and do all the tick box activities for med school and a publication shouldn't really be taking priority over that. Um so it can take a bit longer to write your manuscript. What you submitted for your S S C won't be, probably won't be journal article quality. Um You will need to do a lot of editing. Um and that will be done with your supervisor. So it depends on your availability and there's, but there is genuinely no rush. A lot of the work that I've managed to get to publication. Yeah, it required about nine months of going back and forth. And as you can see the next arrow, once you submit, it will go through peer review and then you've got to wait for them to critique the hell out of your paper and it will be checked for pay Jeurys. Um It will be assessed by clinicians who are experts in the field and it will be determined if it fits the aims and scopes of the journal, which is really important as to why you should research your journal before submitting, which I'll show you as well. But your supervisor is really, really helpful in those things. Um And in about 3 to 5 months after submitting, you will receive a decision on that article. Now, majority of us will get a reject. Um but ask to revise or asked to resubmit, um you might get an outright reject as well, but you will have all of these comments to work on which is really nice. So you always get feedback and I promise you it's painful, but every feedback you receive will make you will make the paper better. So I think the my most recent rejection has been my fourth one for a systematic review have been trying to publish since 2021. So, so it's 2023 now. Um that's about a year and a bit. And um this latest one was like, we actually just want, we want you to revise and resubmit. So I would get rejections from all the others with all these comments that I had to work on. And as I've worked on each of these comments and the paper will transform, then I resubmit. Um I finally got a revision and resubmit, which is a good sign. It means that they just want you to make a few changes and they're willing to accept it for publication once you've done those changes. So you'll be provided with peer review, our comments and it will have like bullet points that you have to answer every single one and you will have to resubmit with a letter detailing how you've answered every single one of those comments. You will then receive a new decision. You might be asked to do more revisions and re submissions, but you will get published. The publication game is not about who's the best and who's the genius. It's actually about who can purse of it. And um if you're a person who's been not back before and has still got up and try again, then publication is definitely within your reach, you just need to keep going. So the journal submission checklist um decide what type of article your work is. Is it a systematic review? Is it a original research piece? Is it's an editorial, which is what my essay competition was? Um And if you're not sure, go and ask your supervisor read the author guidelines um and see where it fits in, choose a journal. I have always asked for people's advice on how to choose a journal because this is just not something that I'm good at as a student and it's absolutely normal if you're not either, I don't know what journals best on what journals, not obviously you want to go for a high impact journal, which means that the journal has a lot of readership and interest and citations, which is great for your, it's just your general um career in research. If you're really thinking about academia, it can, it can make you look good on research gate. Um But you really want to choose a journal that you have a high chance of getting accepted in. If your research is about substance use, look for journals with substance use in the title for a start because you already meet the scopes you probably because your papers about substance use. Um If your paper focuses on a particular area, um if your paper has participants that our Children look for a pediatric journal, something that's relevant to Children or child health, right? A cover letter loads of templates can be found online um and register for an author account and then submit and in the cover letter. What you want to be talking about is high. I am dear name of the edit. Er I am submitting an article for this journal. This is how it meets the scopes. This is why it's of interest to readers. Thank you for your consideration, your sincerely and like I said before, do not be, do not be fearful of failure or be put off by rejections. Um You must persevere, don't rush and seek help from supervisors. I love a good email to a supervisor and say, look, this is what I've done so far, but I need you to help me with the rest. You have to seek help with this. No one gets published on their own. Um And it's, it's a journey and it requires a lot of input from people who are senior to you and know how to do this sort of thing. So some take home message is because I've spoken for a lot, um spend time seeking out opportunities to find out more about yourself. Yes, having a great CV and a great linked in profile is all well and good. But actually some of these opportunities allow you to meet people that change your life quite literally and change your trajectory and make you think about medicine in a different way. I never thought I would be interested in academic research until I started applying myself and gave it a chance. I don't think I'll be, I'll do a ph or become a professor. But all of this experience has made me so much more confident if someone was to say, oh, can you analyze this data? Nine times out of 10? I probably could unless it was very, very complex. And even then there's a challenge to learn something more, keep open minded and being engaged in opportunities that come your way. I know an S S C and a scholarly project can be a rolls. I'm uh I roll moment or I have to do this as part of my curriculum but actually put in effort and guys, I want like 750 lbs from presenting that sse I took a nice holiday. Okay. You can get, you can actually read rewards from this that is helpful for a student. Every little helps. So there is, there is an incentive to do well beyond just a CV. Share your achievements linked in social media. All of these things can ride in your surface area to opportunities. And like I've said before, having a great CV is the only way somebody can tell what like what your track record is. So you're gonna have your transcript, but your C V is going to be that real insight into whether someone takes you on for an elective, whether someone lets you join a research project and I want you guys to have lots of different and interesting things on there that have not just come from being at medical school, do not fear failure. This is not an easy journey. I've been rejected so many times and I can do a whole different talk on that, but being knocked back is not personal and it's not about you. It's just a fact of life. And as someone who takes, it's like throwing darts at a dartboard, you're gonna miss sometimes it's the people who are not throwing enough that are getting balls i every time because they're making very calculated um guesses and attempts at things be uncalculated, be messy, be all over the place, be out there and look at things that are gonna add to your life and that you're interested in and want to just go for and you don't always need to reinvent the wheel if there's an opportunity that you're going for and you find on linkedin that somebody has done it or you want to go for an essay competition that I've done asked me for help. And I'm happy to send you like what I submitted how I found the process. Um when I applied to Cambridge, I found people who have gone to Cambridge as an integrating student. And it gave me so much more insight into the process, please. If there is a person who's done it before. Try not to go in blind, try not to reinvent stuff because you will struggle, you will stress yourself out and there's just no need. So, thank you. I'm willing to take any questions. These are my social media's and I do post a lot about research and um I have this book where I share like all my um examples of my work and how to write a cover letter, how, how to go through rejections when you come to a journal article. And just a few things like, for example, space ick stats you should know as a medical student and principles of statistics and things. So if you are interested, um please have a look at my website. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jessica and just want to congratulate, you know, the recent expectation of the systematic review. It's really cool and I'm sure everyone is very inspired today and I certainly am by research and it's very inspiring and your words are very encouraging and inspiring as well. And if everyone could feel in the feedback from were really helpful and receive the slides as well. And if you have any questions, you can message Jessica, I'll just feel free to enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much. Yeah. Oh, great. I'm really not sweaty. Very good. Thank you. Just a quick summary to take away. Thank you so much, Jessica. Uh I just had a question because you obviously are very interested in SFP. Why would you apply next year? That's really, really good question. So, uh yeah, I am interested in the SFP. Um The reason why I recommend the SFP is because there is no downside in trying to do it. You still apply to the Standard Foundation program. It's just an extra application. You get the chance to do an interview, which I think is so important for medics get in uncomfortable situations, get someone questioning about your questioning you about your passions because how often does that happen? You know? So I think I um really torn. I'm not quite interested in medical education. I think I'll definitely go for the research or the leadership and management route. But I think research is probably a bit. And at London, I live in London, so I'd like to stay. Are you applying for the SFP agent? Uh I've applied and I will be doing mad at SFP and Sheffield this August. Oh Congrats. No, no. Thank you so much. Oh Med is med. It is fun. It is fun. You a lot of teachings. You're gonna be doing a lot of this. Yeah, but I, yeah, like you have profit to do research and want to do some medical education research in particular. And also, you know, mention something that might be helpful for special duplication afterwards. But I just want to enjoy the four months teaching. I think I look forward to that. Are you thinking about plastic surgery. Yeah, I'm thinking about plastic surgery. Nice. Were you interested in psychiatry? Yes. So, uh, my, my interests are between pediatrics and psychiatry or chart and it will be specifically child and adolescent psychiatry. I'm also still open to pediatric surgery but getting that experience that medical school is unheard of, um, pediatric surgery is not really one of our rotations. We, although pediatrics is, um, but yeah, I see, I just question. So I've been working on a systematic review and after meeting with my supervisor, he mentioned that he is interested in getting others in the field involved to help with the likelihood of getting published. How would you recommend going about getting people involved? So one thing I actually should have talked about in this uh presentation actually is the uh kind of sequence of authorship. So to be a first author of the, of the paper, you have done the most work and if this is your systematic review, you've written majority of it and you've done most of the work then as, as long as you kind of make clear to him, yes, you're happy for other people to be added, but you will be, you will remain the first author. I recommend getting people on board because whether you have 10 people in a authorship line or three, as long as you're first, it doesn't really matter. As long as you're an author, it doesn't really matter. But I think the reason I say, make sure you're first is I'm assuming you've done the most work and you're kind of worried about other people um piggybacking off of that. But honestly, I've not been, I've been first author for most of my work because I've done the most work on it. But in situations where I haven't, I've done things like screened papers for systematic reviews or provided grammar and spelling, um reviewed to the final manuscript or revise the discussion a little bit sort of helped out minimally like here and there, but I've contributed to the papers. So they've provided me with authorship. But if you are the person who has done the most work, just be like, yes, I'd be happy to have people. And can I just confirm that I'll still be main author. Don't be afraid of saying this stuff because, you know, you're still in your early career and this stuff matters a lot to you, a professor or a phd scholar that he's bringing on this could be their seventh or eighth publication. Um Whereas you like it matters. So, yeah, as long as you are getting, you're in the correct sequence of work because it's the person who does the most work all the way down, the person who did the least slash supervised the project, which is how professors get so many publications because you just put their name on the end because they gave you some guidance. Um Then that's fine and that's how author ships that should work. It shouldn't, that is a legal requirement to be published in the journal. It should be the, the order that people put in the work. So if you put in the most, you should be first. If you haven't, you put in kind of like a middle amount, you should be second or third and so on. I hope that helps. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you so much. I realize we're already at seven o'clock and we don't really have any more questions and I think we should end the top care if that's okay. Amazing. Amazing. I'm glad you found it useful and have a great evening. Oh, there's one question. Uh oh gosh, can you explain the difference between systematic and literature research? So, yeah, this is something that I, I, I touch on all the different types of research, specifically systematic and literature research in my E book and I talk all beginning and end to systematic review um literature research, but a literature review is um going through the literature and summarizing it and then putting it into groups of themes. So okay, let's say I was doing um the mental health of Children and young people, a literature review. What I would do is I would read um I would still have the same methodology as a systematic review. So I'd look through certain databases. I'd have a search strategy, look through the literature, but I wouldn't be trying to summarize results necessarily. I'd be trying to summarize ideas. So you would divide it into themes, you might divide it into prevalence treatments and um trajectory of the future. Those would be your three themes for China adolescent mental health. There's a systematic review, you have to be more specific. Um You'd have to ask the question. Um is substance use more prevalent in homeless adolescence or is substance use more prevalent in adolescents with mental health issues? Then you would build a search strategy on that and you have to actually extract data from studies like our CTS mainly, you wouldn't really be including other studies and you'd be talking about those quantitative results in a literature review. You don't have to do that. You should be summarizing ideas in the literature. Um But yeah, just it's seven. I'm sure everybody wants to go and have dinner or something now. So I will leave it there. Yeah, no worries. I just want to make sure I get that's correct. Are you saying literature review is just something smaller than a systematic review? Is that a literature review can still be really big? But it's summarizing ideas of papers. Um It's like kind of what I mentioned when I was doing the critical appraisal, it will be summarizing paragraphs like that. A systematic review is actually extracting data from these things. So being like, okay, this paper had an odds ratio one point something but this other paper is an odd ratio of this may be homeless. Um Add essence, don't actually use substances as much as possible. And the literature is conflicting. A literature review only focuses on mainly their ideas. But anyone who has further questions or want me to send any specific resources, if you drop me a dumb any of these platforms and have a look at my website and blog posts um then just contact me on there and I always try to respond. Sure again, thank you so much, Jessica. It's very, very high everyone. I.