Q&A with Lloyd 🔬

Hi! My name is Lloyd (he/him/his) and I’m a first year medical student at Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine (McMaster University). I'm a long time Mac student and also did my undergrad here in iBioMed where my studies were focused on human-centred design and healthcare innovation. I was inspired to enter the medical field from talking to all the amazing healthcare providers I met while learning about innovation in medicine. I want to be able to carry my passion in innovation and design thinking forward into my medical practice where I’ll be trying new things out to improve workflow and patient care. Outside of class I love singing (even if it’s off key), painting surrealist visions, staying active at the gym, and browsing reddit for news updates and hot takes. 

I was a paid SickKids summer research student part of the SickKids Summer Research Program (SSuRe) during the summer of 2021 where I performed a variety of wet and dry lab work for the Mouse Imaging Centre (MiCE). We were located in the Centre for Phenogenomics (TCP) which is adjacent to Mount Sinai Hospital. My lab specialized in medical biophysics and most of our work was focused on neuroimagery of mouse brains using several types of scans like MRI, CT, etc. The funny thing is that most people think that mouse MRIs are tiny when they are actually the size of a room. It’s because the machinery required to run the scan is virtually the same as any hospital MRI (you need the giant magnets and coolant systems) but the actual tubes we use to house the mice during these scans are in fact mouse-sized. 

During this summer I was part of a couple projects but my main obligation was to a longitudinal experiment on how maternal diet affects offspring brain development. This involved many mouse observation protocols but also allowed me an opportunity to learn how to use an MRI, perfuse a mouse brain for ex-vivo study, and draft up my own protocol for maternal mouse observations. I also learned to write a few data pipeline scripts (I’m not great at coding though) processing the scans I was performing. On the side, I was also helping a PhD student with his drug trial project where I was able to help with injections and MRI scanning of mouse brains at multiple time points during development.

Admittedly, I sent about 15ish cold emails around December of 2020 to many PIs (Principal Investigators) based in UHN affiliated hospitals. I went through the staff directories of hospitals and research institutes like SickKids and St. Michael’s Hospital and made notes on a few investigators with research I was interested in. I drafted up a unique email for each one of them and although this took a while, I made sure to comment on how my personal experiences and interests align with theirs while including an updated version of my resume and transcript in that email. Most of the PIs never responded and a few of them told me they simply didn’t have the funds or work to justify hiring an undergraduate student but a couple did get back to me. One of them, Mark Palmart, was an endocrinologist based out of SickKids who did diet studies and told me to email him back later in the year and inquire again when funding was a little more solidified. A couple months later, I did just that and he met up with me only for him to offer me a job a couple days later. 

My takeaway is that most people get research through cold emails and while it is an arduous process, you are playing a numbers game and if you reach out to enough people, chances are that one of them could use the help of a research assistant. Don’t be scared to highlight your specific ties and interests to their work so they understand why you want to be involved in their field and don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive a reply or affirmative action right away as most researchers aren’t on the lookout for new students but occasionally you’ll stumble on one that’s a good fit if you reach out to enough people. 

I once made a mistake that almost ruined my grad student’s experiment. I was injecting mice with a manganese contrast to prepare them for brain scans the next day. It wasn’t until I finished scanning the cage of mice that I realized that I injected the wrong cage with needles that I had prepared for another cage of much older and larger mice. As a result, I injected nearly 3 times the recommended dosage of a fairly cytotoxic compound into these experimental mice and at that point was just so worried that I had killed the litter and also ruined the experiment of someone that had placed so much trust in me. I was honest with my grad student about my error and luckily no mice died as a result and no grad students became enraged but I learned a lot about the importance of double checking your work and having an organized and systematic approach in the lab. 

As much as I enjoyed this research opportunity, I’m looking towards diversifying and building up my resume to include other experiences, including clinical research and quality improvement work. My research experience at SickKids was all about understanding brain changes at a scientific level but these results would have been decades away from the patient bedside and if anything, this opportunity has solidified my interest which leans more towards clinical care. I believe that all medical students should, at some point, be exposed to basic science as it is quite literally the foundation of where our medical knowledge base comes from and to understand the thought process and inquiry that goes behind lab work could make us all better doctors but this opportunity has made me want to explore parallel fields in medical research while leveraging the lessons and connections I made along the way.

https://www.sickkids.ca/en/research/researchers/?rpp11400=12&s11400=titleasc&pg11400=3#DirList-11400 → not a bad directory to start if you are looking for a few SickKids researchers to email for opportunities 

https://www.sickkids.ca/en/research/research-training-centre/summer-research-program/ → details on the SickKids Summer Research Program (SSuRe)

Healthcare is such a broad field and you would be surprised by the diversity of ways people are contributing to both the knowledge base and practice of patient care. Whatever your interests are, there is probably some way that they can connect with the field of healthcare so don’t forget to leverage yourself and your unique personality when applying to and exploring professions in healthcare.