Relevance of Undergrad Research to Grad Program?

[DontchaWantaPharma]

Hey all!

I've got a question regarding a dilemma I'm facing in my senior year of college. I plan to graduate this fall and to apply to PhD programs concurrently for the following fall. I joined a neurogenetics lab in my freshman year and have been there throughout my entire undergraduate college life, as I've transitioned from being interested in biomedical engineering to loving biochemistry and neurobiology. Here is my dilemma - my research interests have slowly changed to have more of a focus on neurochemistry and protein engineering, and as such I'm interested in applying to Biochemistry and Pharmacology PhD programs. I'm concerned that my undergraduate research experience, wherein I've primarily done computational phenotype analysis of synapses (and got authorship on a paper, albeit second-to-last author), classical genetics (i.e. crossing flies), and some work with PCR and plasmid creation via ligations, etc, has little relevance to what I'm more interested in working on in graduate school. As such, I've been contemplating leaving this lab and joining a biochemistry lab so that I could at least have ~10 months of biochem lab experience to document when I apply for programs.

I've talked to my undergraduate advisor, who argued this wouldn't really bolster my application and that I might have issues getting into a lab as a senior since there's less payoff for a lab to accept a senior for training compared to a freshman they could use for longer. I was pretty set on leaving my lab prior to this, but those seem like valid arguments. As a result, I'm now kind of stumped and looking for advice - should I stay in my established lab where I do work that has little relevance to anything I'd want to do in graduate school, or leave and face the potential negative of not being able to get into a lab, plus whatever perceived negatives might be associated with the act of leaving my first lab? I'm also mildly concerned about my chances for getting a positive recommendation letter if I leave my current lab right now, since my PI has shifted my work towards the beginnings of characterizing a candidate gene found in a screen I took over from another undergraduate that graduated recently that's been lagging severely and it might be leaving with a bad impression of my aptitude as a researcher.

 

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

[shur42]

Hi @DontchaWantaPharma! I am not sure if it's true for your field, but here's what I think. It doesn't really matter what was your undergrad research about; you need to have it in your portfolio to demonstrate that you can do research (can master equipment/protocols, can work with other people, can write, etc). 

I met chemistry PhD students who did their undergrad in aerospace and knew absolutely nothing about chemistry upon entering their PhD program.In your case, you won't even be making such big a leap, so you should be totally fine!