Mentorship Governs Your Relationship with Research

By: Ambreen Deol

What decides whether you fall in love with research or avoid it altogether as your career takes shape? Your capabilities and academic rigor? Partly. But the real governing factor, especially when you’re starting out, is mentorship.

During my nearly six years of medical school in India, I got almost zero exposure to research. We crammed theory, regurgitated it onto exam papers, and rotated through wards. Research wasn’t part of the curriculum, and no one really talked about it.

When reading through a textbook, questions would pop into my head. Has anyone tried this? What if we did it this way? How do we know how this works? I’d just sit with the question, because I didn’t know I could simply look something up. I had no clue what PubMed was. In most Indian medical colleges, the focus is overwhelmingly clinical, not academic.

The advice that wasn’t actionable

When I started leaning toward research, I was grasping at straws. I had ideas but no means to execute them. No institutional support, no infrastructure, no mentorship, no role models. The people I reached out to for guidance would say, “Just start with a case report. Read the literature, you’ll catch the drift.” I couldn’t make heads or tails of scientific papers at that point. And as a med student, every case looks unique, because you’ve barely seen any. I’d badger my mentors on every rotation, “Do you see this often? Is this rare? Can we do a case report on this?” The answer to the last one was almost always no.

Attending countless workshops on research methodology, I learned the same thing over and over: PICO question, methods, study design. “It’s really simple,” they’d say. None of them taught you how to actually do anything. There was no Research 101 for someone who didn’t know where to start. I almost got pulled into one of those 12-week courses promising you’d be able to churn out a manuscript a month. Coming from a lower middle class family, I couldn’t afford to enroll, thankfully.

So I did it myself

Eventually, I took it into my own hands. I had noticed how my own family made certain medical decisions, while the patients I saw during clinical rotations, mostly from rural backgrounds, navigated the same system completely differently. I built a health literacy questionnaire, ran a cross-sectional study across my state, and presented it at a national conference. It was the first work I had ever done, and a solo one. Reviewers kept asking, “Who’s your guide? Who’s the PI?” I’d say, “I am.” I hadn’t realized a senior author or guide was supposed to exist. Looking around at the other posters, I saw that everyone else had a guide. I had been doing it on my own without knowing any better.

There I met another med student in the same boat, also aspiring to be a surgeon. We collaborated on a study about the factors influencing female medical students to pursue a career in surgery. That paper was presented at ACS 2024 and published in The American Surgeon. It was my first publication and my first real step into the research world. The results were good, and we had somehow figured it out on our own.

Encouraged, I came up with another idea: an interventional study on whether intermittent fasting could reduce HbA1c in patients with diabetes. I posted my proposal on an online platform that funds independent research ideas, and secured an $8,000 grant on the condition that I actually start the study. I reached out to multiple faculty at my institution. None of them could help, because the work required infrastructure and experience the system here simply didn’t provide. The grant evaporated. My ideas were too ambitious for the system that contained me.

The mockery and exhaustion

Next, I came up with a question that wouldn’t cost money. At what age do surgeons retire? Do they retire at all? I built a validated questionnaire, this time recruiting a professor from community medicine to act as my PI for support, and I walked the survey personally to every surgeon at my institute. Multiple surgeons assumed I was hired by some resident to help with their research, because there was no way a med student could have a research question and run her own study. Most trainees in my country who do research only do it because their residency curriculum requires them to write a thesis. There is no separate research track for med students, or even for residents who actually want one. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.

By that point, I was done. The dead ends, the gatekeeping, the mockery had all but worn me out. As a female IMG drawn to surgery from a med school where not a single faculty surgeon was female, where the lack of female role models was, by my own study’s findings, a documented deterrent for women considering the specialty, I wanted to bypass research entirely. I felt completely lost. I stopped looking. The thing that used to excite me now exhausted me.

The dinner I wasn’t invited to

During a thoracic surgery elective in the U.S., I heard about a Women in Surgery dinner. It was for trainees and attendings, and med students weren’t invited. I went anyway. I wanted, more than anything, to be in a room with female surgeons. I sat next to a surgeon’s husband, who introduced me to his wife. We talked for 45 minutes, and I shared my story with her. She told me she had more research work than she could keep up with, and that she needed help.

Fast forward a year. I’m working with her.

This mentor is the best thing that has happened to me professionally. Until last year, I was dreading the prospect of doing research just to qualify for residency. Now I can’t get enough of it. There’s so much to learn, and the experience is empowering. Most of all, I love the teamwork: the brainstorming, the collaboration, the ideas none of us could have built alone. There is something beautiful about devising work that can affect lives at scale.

I am also, finally, learning how to read a scientific paper. Every workshop I had ever attended told me to “read the literature.” None of them taught me how. You don’t know what you don’t know. You know what you want, but you have no idea how to get it. You need someone to show you.

What I’d tell anyone starting out

Research can’t be forced. But what you can do is lay the conditions for it. Take every opportunity, even the smallest ones, be it a dinner, a casual event, or a conference. If you weren’t invited, go anyway. As a woman in surgery, especially as an IMG, you have to advocate for yourself relentlessly, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Some of this is luck of the draw, but I genuinely believe you make the conditions that attract that luck. I would not be here if I hadn’t turned over every stone I could find. The mentor I have now feels almost like a reward for refusing to stop looking.

So here’s my advice if you’re faced with similar barriers: Don’t start with case reports. Don’t start with courses that charge you thousands of dollars. Start with the right mentor. That is the first step and the thing that matters the most. Everything else will fall into place. Finding someone who supports your goals and does everything they can to set you up for success is partly luck, but you can build the conditions for that luck. Luck arrives through surface area, and here are a few specific items you can act on today to increase surface area for that yourself, for free:

• Find the names before you find the person. Search PubMed for the question you care about, filter to the last five years, and look at the last author on the papers that interest you. Their institutional email is almost always on the paper itself or a Google search away on the faculty page.
• Aim for people that are relatively approachable. Residents and fellows are more likely to answer emails than attendings, and they are the ones who bring you into their attending’s project. Reach out to the administrative assistants and coordinators who can connect you to the people above them.
• Be the collaborator people want a second time. Reliability is something that’s incredibly valuable in the academic space. Answer emails within a day. Deliver what you said you’d deliver, on the date you said it. Say when you’re stuck instead of going quiet.
• Control what you can control, take every opportunity until the right person walks into the room (or until you walk into the right room).

Whether you come to love research or hate it has almost nothing to do with research itself. It depends entirely on who is standing next to you when you do it.

Ambreen Deol, MBBS, is a Surgical Oncology Research Fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her work focuses on improving preoperative communication and aligning patient expectations with the realities of postoperative recovery for patients undergoing high-risk abdominal cancer surgery. She earned her medical degree in India and is an advocate for international medical graduates, devoted to building accessible mentorship pathways for those coming up behind her. She is also committed to medical education and currently serves as an author for First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 and a content writer for High-Yield Topics by ScholarRx. She hopes to become a surgeon-scientist who makes a meaningful difference in the world.