Pre-application research diversity

Hi everyone,

So I’m a medical doctor who has been toying with the idea of pursuing a phd for a while because I like and do research anyway and figure it will help me in the long term when I’m trying to secure better consultant/attending jobs once I am done with residency.

I recently spoke to a postdoctoral fellow in our team and she was rather snarky about my previous research experienced not being very specialty- or particular topic- focused (I’ve moved around a lot between different specialties as a part of UK training and thus have papers from a few different fields). She said I would really have to “sort that out” and fine-tune a very clear research question before I apply. Which is fair enough I guess. I have a topic in mind obviously and I don’t think my prior stuff is as diverse as she made it out to be in this discussion but I guess my first question is:

how detailed was your research question when you applied and how much did it change throughout your phd studies?

She also talked about having a higher H index being beneficial for applications. Which makes sense to me but mine is currently a 5 which I cockily thought was pretty decent until this discussion. So I guess my second question is what was yours when you applied and did you think it was the make-or-break factor in getting into your program of choice?