Well, my work was in Vascular Biology (non-ortho), and so I ended up going to a bunch of meetings like FASEB, BMES, and SFRMB. Still pretty good press, though. The point is that no ones really expecting a med student to make a meaningful contribution to the canon of "evidence based practices in Orthopaedics"... so whether you stand in front of a poster talking about the cadaveric ACLs you tortured or FEM of bridge structures or whatever, it still represents the same skill and speaks to your character in the same way.
I've said it before and I still think it's true: it's all about what you can talk about... I'd think most academic places (and programs trying to get their research going) would like to hear an applicant cogently speaking about how s/he got his/her hands wet with experience and not just bean-counting... because unless you just happen to fall into a program which happens to be doing just the exact same research in Ortho that you've been doing, you're going to have to basically relearn a new research discipline.
I mean, if you were a college football coach, would you rather recruit Jim who played second string football all of his life, or Usain Bolt who's never touched a football? I'd probably take my chances on teaching the latter how to tuck it during spring practice...
