picking a lab

Graduate School
1

<p>this thread kinda stems from the previous one on "Working in a lab" but i have some more specific questions on how to choose a lab as an undergrad.</p>

<p>i'm interested in working in a lab this year (2nd year of undergrad, with some prior experience) and it seems like i have two options of professors to work with. i've heard it's good to work with a young professor (assistant/associate) in order to maximize the amount you can learn from lab experience and your chance to publish in a journal. however, i'm at a big-name school, and there are a lot of professors here in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics who are very well known in their respective disciplines. however, it seems like the undergrads who work with them are into grunt lab work (in the chemical / biological sciences), and i'm not sure if that's the best bet either. does anyone have any suggestions with regards to what type of professor to work with? do recs. for grad school necessarily have to be from bigshots in the field, and if so, will they siginificantly impact your admissions chances into top programs (positively)?</p>

<p>also, i'm looking to combine my interests in biology, chemistry, physics, and math when choosing a lab to work in. i'm trying to look for interesting fields that cover all those topics, and i'm wondering if any of you grad students/people with research experience can give me insight into frontier work in the biological/physical sciences. molliebatmit: what kind of work do you do now/ did you do as an undergrad? i've been in a purely basic science research lab and i realized i didn't want to be stuck doing basic lab work for the rest of my academic career. currently, i've been browsing through disciplines like systems biology / systems neuroscience...any more suggestions?</p>

<p>thanks in advance!</p>

2

<p>
[quote]
do recs. for grad school necessarily have to be from bigshots in the field, and if so, will they siginificantly impact your admissions chances into top programs (positively)?

[/quote]

Recommendations certainly don't have to be from a big name. It does help to have recommendations from big names, though. There's not a one-size-fits-all answer, because different professors approach undergraduate researchers differently.</p>

<p>Ideally, you'd like to optimize for a lab where you can do something cool/interesting/meaningful, get good mentorship for your career, and get an outstanding letter of recommendation. You can't always get all of these things in the same place, so ultimately you'll just have to decide what's important for you.</p>

<p>There have been a lot of questions lately on the value of grunt work vs. independent projects with regard to grad school admissions. My take is that there's grunt work (washing glassware) and there's technical work (making plasmids, culturing cells, running Western blots). Those two aren't the same, and if you're doing mostly technical work, that's totally fine. Doing technical work on a great project can be better than doing independent work on some crappy dead-end project, for sure. You probably would like to avoid doing grunt work if at all possible, but there's no shame in doing technical work.</p>

<p>
[quote]
molliebatmit: what kind of work do you do now/ did you do as an undergrad?

[/quote]

Well, I'm definitely a basic scientist. As an undergrad, I worked in a lab that studies the protein composition of a neural compartment called the postsynaptic density. It was mostly neurobiology with some biochemistry and cell biology thrown in. My graduate lab studies the developmental programs that cause neural progenitor cells to become different types of mature neurons -- it's a developmental neurobiology lab, and I still get to do biochemistry and cell biology on the side.</p>

<p>There's definitely research in neurobiology that could use a good dose of physics and math. I'm not too familiar with that kind of work, since I'm firmly on the biology side, but I know it exists.</p>

3

<p>i agree that there's nothing wrong with doing technical work...but i guess i'd like to have a good balance of technical work and independent thinking. i'll have to look into some more areas of biology that involve physics and math.</p>

<p>what exactly constitutes a big name professor...his/her notoriety in the scientific world, or the name recognition of his/her degrees?</p>

4

<p>I'm a rising senior at a university with a pretty good reputation for research. I've worked for a big name scientist and an associate professor. The experiences were very different, but both were very good. </p>

<p>The big name scientist had a lot of money to work with and I was able to learn a lot of different techniques that have since been very valuable. My work was with experimental therapeutics and lymphoma. I worked in a large lab but I was still able to get first-author on an abstract and second author on a paper published in a good journal.</p>

<p>My work for the associate professor is on microglia, dopamine neurons, and parkinsons. I have been able to work independently and develop my own plan. The work is a little repetative - there's not as much money to work with so I haven't learned as many techniques. On the up-side, I have a close relationship with my boss. </p>

<p>From what I've seen, what makes the name is the number of papers published, the journals those papers were published in, the impact those papers had on the scientific community, and how well-known the scientist is. </p>

<p>As far as getting involved in mathematics and physics - I would check out biomechanics and labs that do biofeedback research...</p>

5

<p>I just think independent work is overrated for undergrads. Some people make it work, but often students end up doing ill-conceived dead-end projects. It's okay not to be able to do great science independently as an undergrad -- you slowly pick up the independence as a graduate student and as a postdoc. </p>

<p>The most important things to pick up as an undergraduate are technical skills, the ability to read the primary literature, and the ability to troubleshoot and think about experiments and results.</p>