<p>Is it easy to get quality undergraduate research opportunities as an undergraduate at JHU?</p>
<p>Depends on the major and depends on what you define quality to be. It also depends on your academic background as well. As an undergraduate you tend to (but not always) be a slave to grad students/faculty in terms of research doing most of their grunt work. But many also have the opportunity to conduct independent research, it really depends on the lab that you work in, and unfortunately the experience you will have greatly depends on where you work and whom you work for.</p>
<p>Well, I'm going to be in BME if I got to JHU. In high school, I did a fairly large research project. I just don't want to be a "slave to grad students/faculty in terms of research doing most of their grunt work." I would like to get my name on a paper or something instead of cleaning pipettes and running electropheresis.
I asked after reading a blog by a current MIT student.
She wrote:
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2. OSU is a very, very big place. I had been to a National Merit Semifinalist weekend there in the fall, and all the professors had given lip service to the idea that you could get a research job, if you were willing to knock on enough doors and really fight for a position. I had friends who were doing "research" jobs at OSU which basically involved cleaning glassware. Washing dishes is not a job for an undergraduate; washing dishes is a job for a dishwashing machine, okay.
Labs at MIT are likely to be considerably better-funded (and therefore more likely to pay you for your work). More importantly for me, labs at MIT are more likely to have a favorable view of your intelligence as an undergraduate and allow you to pursue interesting research in an essentially independent manner. Furthermore, you don't have to beat down doors in order to get a research position -- as you probably already know, about 80% of us do undergraduate research through UROP. You don't have to fight for those sorts of opportunities.
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<p>An admitted student recently ask a similar question through our askastudent e-mail account and I thought the response was worth posting here too...</p>
<p>Michelle B. who blogs for JHU (<a href="http://hopkins.typepad.com/michelleb/)wrote%5B/url%5D">http://hopkins.typepad.com/michelleb/)wrote</a> this about JHU research...</p>
<p>"In regards to research, you ask some great questions. Like you, I'm pre med, and research is something that I'm really interested in doing. I truly believe Hopkins is the best place I could be for that- the research opportunities are indeed endless. </p>
<p>You pretty much know all the steps involved in getting a research position, but I'll expand on them a little bit. There are a few ways to contact faculty in order to get a lab position. First, you could go up to a professor after class and ask them about opportunities in their lab and in their department. So, if you want to work in a biology lab, talk to your biology professor. If there's something they talked about in class that seemed interesting, bring it up and ask if there's anyone doing research that relates to those areas. Also, you could peruse the department web page and read about the faculty members. They have descriptions of their research interests, and you could find which faculty members are doing things that you like best, and then email them. </p>
<p>I've used both methods. Over the summer, I was taking a neuroscience class, and wanted to secure a lab position for the fall. I walked up to my professor after class and told him that I was interested in doing research in memory pathways. He gave me the name of Michaela Gallagher, head of the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and I set up a meeting with her. She was incredibly helpful, and said she'd love to have me in her lab in the fall. She knew I was only sophomore, and had never had any lab experience before, but it wasn't an issue at all. A post doctoral student, Joanne, taught me step by step anything that I needed to learn- how to mount brain slides, how to handle the mice, how to slice up a brain for mounting, how to stain the samples. It was such a great learning experience. </p>
<p>Also, when I was organizing my research for my Woodrow Wilson fellowship, I emailed the Director of the JHU Epilepsy Center down at the med school (he also happened to be a med school professor and vice-chair of Neurological labs). You'd think that people of that high standing wouldn¢t be that open to undergrads, but you'd be dead wrong. He wanted to meet with me, and we had a great meeting where he explained what his lab did and worked with me to develop a project that I could do over the summer. My experiences with research here have been great, and that is not the exception, it's the norm. </p>
<p>In terms of how active students become in terms of what they actually do and publishing papers, it really depends on the lab, how long the student has been doing the research, and how in depth they know their material. In the first lab I worked in with Michaela Gallagher, I wasn't really doing anything of the paper-writing sort, because that semester was for me to get familiar with lab techniques- staining, mounting, examining under microscope, that sortof thing. I have grant money from my Woodrow Wilson fellowship for my epilepsy research this summer, so I'm going to be funding my own research and writing a paper on it. I might try to publish it, depending on how the project goes and how good I feel about my paper, but I'm not that worried about it right now. I think once you get here, you'll realize that publishing a paper really isn't the end-all goal, it's more about the lab experience you get. If you've been working in a lab for a while, though, and a paper is something you want to attempt, talk to your primary investigator about it. </p>
<p>You mention that you want to be proactive and contact a professor right away. While it's an admirable attitude, I'm going to advise against it. I really recommend getting to college and getting used to your classes and your life here. You'll have a better idea of which areas of research you want to focus on, too. Then, at the end of your first semester, you can contact professors about starting in the spring of your freshman year. Good luck with everything!"</p>