<p>I live in the Bay Area (Palo Alto - Thats where Stanford is), and knowing that many people here do research, I was wondering how you guys went about it. I know many of my friends have parents who work there, and have managed to get lab/research positions through connections. Unfortunatly, I have no one, how could I go about doing this?</p>
<p>I would call them up</p>
<p>I just finished a research internship at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center which I got through an organized program. Many universities run such programs, but most are only for college students. Many people get research internships at universites simply by emailing professors. Read through the research interests of some professors and find a few that interest you. Email the professors, saying that you're interested in volunteering/interning in their lab. Explain your background and when you would like to work (for a summer? for the whole year?). Some will no doubt ignore your email but you should get some responses.</p>
<p>I got a research intern by contacting a prof in the CS department. </p>
<p>Actually, not sure if it is research. We're constructing a tool for multivariate data viewing, so you can view 3 dimensional data, or 1000 dimensional data.</p>
<p>PS: Emailing MIT and Caltech profs generally doesn't work. I tried. :p</p>
<p>DaTurtle -- PM me (I'm working at Stanford Med Center, btw)</p>
<p>CASE (Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio:</p>
<p>A friend of mine told me that the school is hugely research oriented and if you want to do research, just go up to any professor and be like "yea, hey can I do some research" and they'll set you up immediately! He started researching some properties of iron or something and he got paid like $9/hour - how awesome! :D</p>