Eva Grice

I want to become an orthopaedic surgeon. I’d like to complete a masters and potentially a PhD in orthopaedic medicine. I’ve always been interested in academic medicine, and through the summer internship, I was able to start my research journey.

The internship gave me hands-on experience in writing research papers. This has enabled me to understand what opportunities there are in research, my mentor explained a lot about different opportunities. I wanted to start building research connections, and hopefully be offered more research.

My internship focused on the key parts of building a research paper from start to finish. I began with a literature search which helped me to understand the fundamentals of what I was searching for, and gave me a broader understanding of why the research was important. I collected data from NHS records. This really highlighted how important it is for me as a clinician to mark down all of the facts about patients, so when I come to research it, there’s less missing data in my sets, making my research more robust. And I learned how to interpret the data, something I hadn’t done before, and which challenged me.

Understanding data is integral to Year 3 learning requirements and our research. As I develop my own research and career, learning to interpret data and write academically are really valuable lessons. Learning how to read data and interpret it in a clinical context was very challenging, but I really needed to understand how to do this.

Observing surgeries was a highlight. They were investigating surgical technique, and it put into perspective the important role research plays.

The internship is a structured way to find people. Building connections early in your career is important. I’d really recommend this internship – it pushed me out of my comfort zone with research, and made me think more critically about the information I was looking at.