I’m a sophomore right now, about to be a junior, in Mechanical Engineering, and I’d like to do a PhD when I graduate. I know schools look for undergrad research experience, so I’ve been working in a lab since spring semester of freshman year with a very good faculty adviser. He offers wonderful guidance and support, and I enjoy the lab community, but I don’t totally like the project I’m working on. It has a lot of focus in another field of science/engineering that I don’t want to go into for graduate school. Additionally, I don’t have the best grasp on this field, since it isn’t as related to ME as I’d like, so I feel like any contributions I can make are minimal and superficial.
I’d love to try to get into a project that I have a deeper understanding of and interest for with another faculty member at my uni (I actually have found a number of projects on other faculty’s websites that I am interested in), but I am concerned mainly about two things:
- Will the trade-off between “interesting project that I can contribute a lot to and fully invest myself in” and “very helpful and concerned research adviser that tries hard to get all of his students to succeed” be worth it? I suspect that no matter which faculty adviser I’d end up with, they wouldn’t be as invested in my success as the one I’m currently working under. I know many are too busy to even step into their labs the majority of the time.
- Will graduate schools see that I switched projects/labs and be concerned that I am inconsistent? I don’t want to give them the wrong impression, because I certainly want to and have the ability to commit to a project for a long time. I would just rather explore different areas of research before graduate school so that I could pick a program to apply to that is a better fit for me.