<p>do most people who do UROPs or participate in research during undergrad become researchers? What do the people who don't become researchers, do?</p>
<p>No, of course not. </p>
<p>Basically everybody does undergraduate research at some point at MIT – the official UROP figure is 80%, but I suspect it’s much higher than that, given that not everybody goes through the UROP office to get a position or funding. So almost everybody does research, but not everybody becomes a researcher.</p>
<p>Even of the ~50% of undergrads who go directly to graduate school, not all become researchers.</p>
<p>A large proportion of biology majors are pre-med, but in that department, I’d say UROP participation is nearly 100%.</p>
<p>Of course, even medical schools want to see research experience nowadays, so that might be part of the reason…</p>
<p>I’m doing a UROP this summer, and I have no intention of becoming a researcher. One thing I noticed here is that not all research is very… well, researchy. Your research might be programming, or engineering something new, or building robots. When I think of research I think of labs and mice and chemicals and things, but a lot of it is very different from that. It’s more… practical, I guess… than I’d expected. Maybe that’s just me, though.</p>