<p>I’m not sure how much I agree with that. Every one of my friends within the engineering college at CMU had some sort of research experience outside of their senior capstone project, although a minority of them wound up going to grad school. All the ones that wanted to get a job got one they were satisfied with well before graduation, too.</p>
<p>Also, I think one of the main opportunities at a large research university is the breadth of research going on. I don’t doubt there’s plenty of research going on at smaller LACs, but just by the fact there’s fewer professors you’re going to see fewer disciplines represented, and fewer subdisciplines represented. I thought one of the biggest advantages to going to a school with a large Materials program was the opportunity not only to do research, but to do it in a large variety of subfields.</p>
<p>I think that was pretty well said RacinReaver. It actually isn’t that hard to get a research position as an undergrad at either of the two schools I have gone to (UIUC and TAMU), as I had several different research positions at UIUC and there seem to be plenty of undergrads doing research at TAMU (though I am a grad student here so this is second-hand experience, not first-hand). The bottom line is that the atmosphere at such large schools is not really impersonal. It can be as personal as you want. It would better be described as being an atmosphere where someone can get lost in the crowd if they want to while also being able to stick out and get to know professors if they want to. Really, all you have to do is actually make the effort to get to know professors more closely to get that experience. The small, non-PhD schools have the advantage in this regard because their small size forces this level of personal attention on each student rather than requiring them to seek it. The downside is, like RacinReaver said, there isn’t quite the same breadth of research opportunities, and at most small schools, not the same availability of research.</p>
<p>“Are you seriously going to argue that HMC does as much research as, say, Michigan, for example?”</p>
<p>This is why I asked for your definition of a “ton of research” because clearly you defined it as university-level when a college with 750 students might consider a “ton” of research to be enough to satisfy 800 students or something. I was confused by your post because there is zero point to HMC having a “ton of research” (by your definition) when it doesn’t have enough students to support it and there is therefore no logical reason to even begin to compare its quantity of research to a university. You say “just happens to have enough to force its students through a year” which implies that it barely satisfies its students needs, which in my post above I attempted to show was an incorrect statement.</p>
<p>I agree with RacinReaver that not everyone might begin their life’s work specific subfield at a LAC, but at the very least (at HMC at least) you’ll be able to do research in your field and people who are interested in specialization have to go on to grad school regardless.</p>
<p>I mean a on of research in the sense that the larger universities publish a lot more papers per capita and have a higher research expenditure per capita. HMC does a great job educating it’s students, and it certainly does provide every undergraduate with research opportunities. However, the research (from what I have seen) is markedly different and more applied than that performed at larger universities. It is still very valuable experience and certainly produces aluable results, it is just on a different scale than at universities because HMC chooses to spend it’s money on it’s primary focus: education. It’s research programs primarily serve to further the goal of educating the students rather than just research for the sake of research.</p>
<p>Notice that I said meaningful participation. I don’t doubt that it is indeed trivially easy to garner a research position that encompasses merely washing test tubes or other mundane tasks - and indeed, I know many students whose “research experience” was comprised of solely that. But doing somebody else’s scutwork does not really help you develop as a scholar. When you then try to progress to more meaningful tasks, that’s when you may find that nobody really has anything for you. </p>
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<p>No worries. </p>
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<p>I used to sympathize with this point. But not anymore. Not with the proliferation of the hacker/tinkerer/user-innovation community and the availability of information and networking for that community through the Internet - the upshot being that an enterprising and dedicated engineering student can usually design his own research project with no need to work in an established lab.</p>
<p>As a case in point, I know one guy who was interested in a career in alternative energy and so, over one summer, built and optimized his own solar-powered bicycle out of his existing bicycle and parts he was able to buy from Ebay and various hobbyist stores for a few hundred dollars. He didn’t join a formal research lab to do that, he simply joined some Internet hobbyist groups dedicated towards making homemade solar-powered vehicles where he was able to obtain all of the instructions he needed. Then when he interviewed for jobs with alternative energy companies, he would bring his bike to the interview and demonstrate it. </p>
<p>Or take Reginald Smith, who completed a solo research project about the social network of rappers. Yes - rappers. Furthermore, the project cost him nothing except his time. He downloaded and stripped the authorship credits of rap songs from various rap lyrics websites such as the Original Hip Hop Lyrics Archive ([The</a> Original Hip-Hop (Rap) Lyrics Archive Version 2.0 (Beta)](<a href=“http://www.ohhla.com%5DThe”>http://www.ohhla.com)) and allhiphop.com, which is available for free. He then compiled the data using social networking open-source freeware, finding that He then managed to publish the paper in an academic journal where he received sole author credit.</p>
<p>Let’s face it: it is far more impressive to build your own fully-functional solar-powered bicycle or have a single-authored publication in a scientific journal than to be (at best) stuck as one of the middle authors, destined to be one of the “et. al” authors, in a laundry list of collaborators in a large, formal research project. Yet those solo projects are available to anybody who is interested. Nobody is going to tell you that you can’t immediately start building your own solar-powered bicycle because you first must wash a slew of test tubes and clean a bunch of lab benches before they might confer higher responsibilities to you. You just read the appropriate websites, join the appropriate hobbyist Internet groups, and away you go. Hobbyist groups exist for even such high-tech ventures as nuclear fusion - even high school students have built their own homemade fusion reactors (!) - and genetic engineering/synthetic biology through the biohacking community.</p>
<p>I don’t think the nuclear boy scout is really the type of person you want to be citing for good independent research. Isn’t he currently in jail for stealing smoke detectors or something?</p>
<p>Anyway, starting up independent research at the undergraduate level is somewhat like starting a business at that age. You really need to have your own ideas (many people don’t), have it be feasible to do on your own (for example, resources required, money required to buy parts, etc), and be able to do all the parts of the project relatively on your own. Sure, there are some projects which fit that description, but I don’t think every student interested in research would be able to do it. Heck, if you want to do a research project it’s generally a good idea to do some research on prior work, and if you’re at a tiny non-engineering liberal arts college it’s likely you’ll need to purchase a bunch of papers which can start at over $20 a pop.</p>
<p>Most people like to do supervised research first since it helps you develop skills that you might not already have, and if you don’t have your own feasible project you can get guided by a professor or grad student.</p>
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<p>Perhaps the schools you’ve been affiliated with just didn’t trust their undergrads? By my sophomore year I was designing, running, and analyzing experiments.</p>
<p>Both Francis Crick and Kary Mullis have freely admitted to using LSD. Richard Feynman used to crack safes as a hobby, hit on numerous colleagues’ wives, and used to hold office hours at a Pasadena strip club. </p>
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<p>Uh, why? With the proliferation of the Internet, you can find out practically any information you need for free, or perhaps for a nominal fee. You want to learn about biohacking? You want to learn how to build your own solar vehicle? You want to learn how to write your own Linux distribution? Practically all of that information is available for free on hobbyist websites and discussion groups. </p>
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<p>Again, why? We’re not talking about somebody necessarily striving to be published in a top journal - at least I wasn’t. For that, I agree that you probably do need access to the most recent literature. But let’s face it - most undergraduate engineers even at the top research schools will never publish in a top journal anyway, such venues generally only being available to grad students and professors. Most undergrad engineers just want to build something, without regard for whether what they built is truly the most cutting-edge such project in the entire world. </p>
<p>As a case in point, the guy I know who built the solar-powered bicycle/motorcycle doesn’t really care that his isn’t the “best” such vehicle in the world, nor does he particularly care about having his work published in a journal. He’s not trying to win any prizes. He just thinks it’s cool to have built a functioning solar-powered vehicle, something that - let’s face it - most undergrads at even the top research schools don’t do. </p>
<p>Besides, if access to research papers is truly a concern, I suspect that most strong public library systems have some access to JSTOR or other nonprofit academic repositories. Granted, there may be a ‘moving wall’ that restricts your access to the most recent articles, i.e. anything published in the last few years. But, again, as a mere undergrad, you probably don’t need access to the most recent research, as your project is probably not going to be highly advanced anyway. </p>
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<p>The downside of that being that you end up having to work on their projects, which you may not necessarily want to do. </p>
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<p>Yet those experiments surely still had to fit within the general theme of the lab you were working in. </p>
<p>Look, nobody is denigrating the value that a research university can sometimes provide. Yet at the same time we also have to recognize the proliferation of information resources that are available today for little charge.</p>
<p>I think this is one of the situations where we both see the merits of the other person’s argument and we’re just posting for the sake of posting. I completely agree that for some people a large built-in infrastructure for research isn’t required. For others, the facilities offered by a large research school are desirable. I guess to me, it’s preferable to go to a school which offers those facilities since, as of high school, most people don’t even know what specific major they want, so having the options there are a good safety net.</p>