Question: good morning, for a job in neuroscience, what universities would you recommend and is it worth applying to med school.

Sameer Alladin answered on 7 Nov 2022:

Hi there,

Those are good questions. I don’t think it’s so much an issue of what University you go to, but more the types of skills you want to develop and if that University department is strong in that. Neuroscience is a broad field, and different universities focus on slightly different things as you specialise further. Some schools may focus a bit more on the biological aspects, some focus more on psychological/cognitive aspects, other may specialise in human research, while others encourage lab based work in animal models, etc. Ideally, you want to find a place which is quite balanced until you decide what specific sub-field you’d want to pursue. I’m sorry I haven’t directly answered the question there!

With respect to if to apply to medical school, I can’t say. There are various paths into a neuroscience career, and it really depends on what you want to do. Some people get into neuroscience from psychology (e.g., me) and thus the focus is more on cognitive neuroscience. Others may prefer to dive into core biology based neuroscience and thus they take a degree in that from the start. It’s also possible to pursue clinical neuroscience either from a research-based perspective where you do academic training and research clinically-relevant issues, or you can pursue it from the medical route and then come back into the academic route. If you want to work with people as a clinician and then later do neuroscience work, medical school may be worth considering at this stage. If you don’t want to work as a clinician but want to study the brain and maybe do some work with clinical applications, medical school may not be as relevant.

I hope that’s helpful!