Mediocre research experience?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

I just turned senior chemical engineer major and plan to apply for masters of PhD programs in various engineering fields like Chemical/biological engineering, biomaterial, and biomed engineering, etc. I know such programs look at research experiences, but I am afraid that the admins will consider my research experiences as ‘mediocre’.

Long story short, I have been in this research team since my 2nd semester of college, and all I did was to read some literatures, take experimental values from the other researchers’ paper and use Matlab to see the trends between certain independent variables and dependent variables. I did a presentation about it in our annual undergraduate research conferences, but I didn’t win an award or anything.

My uber lazy professor never actually put me in lab for god knows why reasons even though I have told him multiple times I wanted to be in lab. In fact, we haven’t accomplished anything for last 3 years. I know I should have backed out earlier and found new professor to mentor me, but I kept hoping and hoping that he would give me some specific assignments. But over the time, it was clear that he himself didn’t know what exactly to tell me to do, and wanted ME, an inexperienced undergrad student, to come up with plans. I get it, independent researches are valuable academic and character building experiences, but it only works if your mentor actually gives you some leads and advice. Even his grad student has been lazy with the researches recently, and it’s driving me crazy. Also, the research topic we are dealing with have been in somewhat of limbo for a few decades, and my professor somehow expected me to lead the research that even many accomplished people haven’t been unable to solve.

So, here are my questions.

  1. Belatedly, I found more interesting and active research topics from other professors I know in the department. Do you think I should leave the current group and join them?

  2. If i didn’t publish anything during my time in researches, am I at disadvantage?

  3. If my research experiences are mediocre, can a good GPA and GRE score help offset it?

Thank you. If you want to know more details about my research group, please PM me. I don’t want to put too much details here for the sake of privacies.

2

Look, you don’t need to be some superstar researcher already to get into graduate school, and you don’t need to be published (and, in fact, it’s rare for undergraduates to be published). Really the most important thing is to have some experience to talk about and to have some strong reference letters as a result of that research experience.

Also, I’d suggest avoiding calling your professor and his grades student lazy. The fact that he has currently-funded funded graduate students at all implies that he is not. All that serves to do is make you look like an impetuous child. Scientific research moves slowly at best. And I do mean sloooooooooowly. A decade or more to solve a problem is really not that unusual. If you are this impatient, I question whether you’ll last in graduate school.

3

@boneh3ad thanks for your insight.

Of course I understand the science researches aren’t fast moving. I know that. I was just frustrated and paranoid partly because my friends around me are all involved in researches, and they often talk about interesting things they did while I sit around and do nothing. In fact, one of my friend published a paper recently - he got into masters program full funded.

And the professor being lazy…well, he is notorious for being late in everything. He uploads grade late, he announces his absence late, and the worst…he comes to class ten minutes late when we have TESTS. One time, he uploaded the breakdown of final grades two months after the deadline. I got a B+ in that class, but never found out what I got in my final exam until the next semester. Yeah…it is frustrating.

Again, thanks for your thoughtful response.