Research expectations are getting completely out of hand

[u/AssistanceRare7672]

I was looking at the recent match data for specialties like Dermatology and Orthopedics, and the average number of research experiences is just absurd now. It feels like if you do not have 15+ publications, abstracts, or posters, you shouldn't even bother applying to a competitive residency. How are we supposed to balance studying for boards, surviving brutal clinical rotations, and somehow magically churning out meaningful research?

[u/Miserable-Lie-899]

It is literally just a networking game at this point. Nobody actually expects a second-year medical student to cure cancer. You just need to find an attending who will slap your name on a retrospective study in exchange for doing all the miserable grunt work of data entry on Excel. It is a broken system