I will be graduating in two weeks with my undergraduate degree in CS, and am looking to apply to grad schools. One thing that concerns me is the amount of research experience that I have, which isn’t 0 and does include an REU, but I’m not sure its enough. I looked at a couple professors that I am interested in, but the issue is I held off contacting them because I’d only have a semester left. Though I’ve heard of people in other fields getting research experience through assistantships with professors after graduation, is this also true for CS professors?
I did two years in a heavy research environment between my bachelor’s and my master’s degrees. However, I think that I was just lucky. I applied for the job at a research facility and got it.
There are different types of research. What type do you have in mind?
There are people doing research in other areas that have quantities of data and need to use computers, and therefore need to hire software engineers. This is the situation that I was in.
There are people extending a wide variety of products. Are you specifically hoping to work on computer science research? I am not completely sure what that would look like.
What do you want to do in grad school?
Yes, it is possible in lots of different contexts.
Volunteer as an RA with a professor post-graduation: This one is probably “easiest” in terms of finding someone to agree to hit, but hardest in terms of actually accomplishing it. If you need to work full-time to support yourself, it’ll be difficult to work during the daylight hours that most of this work gets done. However, if you have a flexible schedule, you can try this.
Post-baccalaureate program: There are many post-bacc programs that allow recent graduates to get more research experience before graduate school. One example is the Hot Metal Bridge program at the University of Pittsburgh. Another is Columbia’s post-baccalaureate programs. Not all of them include CS, so you may have to hunt around a bit to find some. Ask your advisers from college.
Work as a lab manager: This is more common in social and natural science labs. Many university research groups/labs have paid research coordinator/research associate/research manager/lab manager positions, where you are coordinating administrative research tasks but also have the opportunity to assist in the actual research and publish papers. These positions are often posted starting in March or April, when the previous year’s lab managers are getting their own acceptance letters and are letting their PIs know they are moving on.
Work at a private company in R&D: There are many private companies that do research, especially in CS. Look at technology companies (big and small) and see what kind of work they have in their R&D departments. But you’ll want to ask a lot of questions and try your best to work on research that’s a little more similar to academic work as opposed to direct product development research (although that’s certainly better than nothing).