<p>Dude, I don’t know how this will be useful… cleaning stuff while unpaid. Can you find any other labs that will offer research projects? Your time would be better spent focusing on school work, reading research papers or perfecting your AutoCad skills as an ME.</p>
<p>uh another professor told me to contact him in september because he said that’s when he’ll know what will be needed. I can contact him too and maybe do both if I can manage.</p>
<p>Don’t do both - its like dating two people at the same time, even if you think you can keep them seperate they’re not going to be happy when they find out. Your objective is not to maximize your research hours but to get a single intensive research experience - pick one and work hard on it.</p>
<p>yeah I didn’t think 2 would be a good idea. Also if i’m in a lasers&plasma diagnostics lab for my whole undergrad research experience and I want to study let’s say fluid dyanmics or energy utilization during grad school. Would that research experience done in my undergrad in a diff field affect my admissions chances? Would they prefer me to have done research in energy during my undergrad?</p>
<p>Getting your foot in the door and showing that you are a great worker and an eager learner is my advice. D1 had an unpaid “internship” 2nd semester of her freshman year (she had honors, etc. credentials)…her job involved creating/updating an educational website for a prof in an entirely different science dept. From his recs regarding her attitude (and her profs’ and advisor’s recs for her aptitude and academic work ethic), it lead to a research position at NASA her sophomore year. Again, it started out as a relatively boring position of analyzing data and sitting in front of a computer screen looking at numbers all day. It lead to MUCH more, and she’s starting her Ph.D. program at Harvard in a couple of weeks. For you as a sophomore, taking the initiate is the first step. Good luck!!!</p>
<p>can someone answer my previous post (post #24)</p>
<p>If you’re worried about it affecting admissions, I would say it *doesn’t *hurt your chances. Doing research in the same field as your grad school interest would give you more personal confidence during application time, but may not matter to the admissions committee. IOW, it will be easier for you to talk about in your personal statement and connect to your interests, but unless your research directly sparks the interest of an adcom/professor, it probably won’t matter much because adcoms, I think, like to see an aptitude for research skills in the broader field like engineering, but not necessarily care what that research is because even they understand that at the undergrad level, you really can’t do much.</p>