Making the most out of your role: M&M Volunteering!

Blog post by: Amarachi Inyama- Regional Lead Sunderland

As a regional leads, and Medics & Me volunteers, we are here to make a difference and help students achieve their dreams, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get anything out of your role!

Life as a medical student is difficult, there is so much pressure but a lack of time and also a hidden curriculum to navigate. Research can seem scary and inaccessible, but through this guide I hope to help you realise that you can create research so more more easily than you imagined.

Where to start?

Research does not always need to be complex. It can start with a simple question.

Within the outreach or community event that you created, could there any impact? This impact could be with yourself, your team or the students involved.

Some examples could be increase in confidence, attitude or self belonging.

When you’ve identified a potential impact you can think about the following questions:

1. How will I measure it? ( e.g. A questionnaire or interview)

2. Data collection and how to do it (e.g: a likert chart for confidence)

Now that you’ve done this you may then want to write an abstract. An abstract is similar to a basic summary of what you did. It needs to be concise and specific. They usually have a limit of 250-300 words. Abstracts are usually split into sections including background, aims, methods, results and conclusion.

Writing your abstract:

1. Background: Here you want to state the problem and why your research is important in solving the issue

2. Aims: This is what you aim to measure or produce.

3. Methods: This outlines what you did and with whom. It’s important here to be specific and outline figures and demographics of your participants.

4. Results show what you found.

   1. It is important to use specific figures to show your findings. Your results could be quantitative or qualitative. It’s important here that you also follow through the details written in your methods

5. Conclusion: You should write about the impact of what you’ve done and recommendations for future work, reflecting on your results.

Next you should look for relevant conferences to submit your abstract to!

Following acceptance they may ask you to do an oral presentation, poster presentation or workshop.

I hope this has demystified research and poster presentations for you!

Here is an example of our work through M&M in Sunderland being presented at a national widening participation conference this year: