<p>How important is undergraduate research when it comes to applying for grad schools?</p>
<p>I'm in the dilemma that I won't be able to pursue significant research my junior year. I will be doing internships related to my major (social policy) but I wish I had the time and experience to do research.</p>
<p>Is research during your senior year meaningless?</p>
<p>You apply during the fall of senior year so I believe so.</p>
<p>Uh, yes I know. However, is it very important to have undergraduate research during your junior year in order to apply for grad school?</p>
<p>It's not important at all. Yeah, it might help, but only in that it shows you have interest in research. It's absolutely not a requirement to apply for grad school.</p>
<p>It depends on which field. You probably won't die if you don't have social policy research, but if you were applying to a biology graduate program, you would really have to have research.</p>
<p>Ericmeng, I want to apply to fields in social policy, political science or sociology. I think the best field of me is sociology. I like urban, education, law and race/gender/class.</p>
<p>Do internships help?</p>
<p>Where is your internship?</p>
<p>I don't mean to threadcrap but how useful is undergraduate research without publications? I recently got word that I got an internship in nanotechnology with a supposed world renown professor. The grad students said I could get a letter of recommendation easily but didn't mention any publications.</p>
<p>phpguru</p>
<p>Currently, I have a sales/marketing internship but I'm waiting on another internship that is housing and urban development. I hope I get the HUD one. Both are paid, full-time positions.</p>
<p>Don't forget about doing research the summer before your senior year...do you have that opportunity???</p>
<p>eadams83, yes you do, that's when you will be most likely to get an internship since you will have completed a large amount of your upper division coursework.</p>
<p>phpguru</p>
<p>"how useful is undergraduate research without publications?"</p>
<p>For science:</p>
<p>A letter of recommendation from a highly regarded PI in your field may go just as far as a publication in a B level journal. It is obviously helpful to have publications (first author publications are a huge plus) - but not a requirement. In fact, having been in charge of your own project (or your own part of a larger team project) that failed is probably going to get you farther than being one of five middle authors on someone else's paper - IF you can demonstrate (in your application essays and interview) that you have an in depth understanding of the field.</p>
<p>If you don't have significant research experience when you apply and you want to get into a top program, it may be worth your while to take a year off to do research full time. </p>
<p>I'm not sure how humanities/social science grad programs do it, but I would assume that some kind of research experience would be essential if one wanted to get into the most highly ranked programs. For any PhD program, departments want to recruit people who will succeed in the graduate environment. One aspect of this is the ability to work on projects that require a long-term investment of time, on the order of a few to several years (as long as 12 for some humanities PhDs!) - something that's very different than completing assignments in a semester long class. An internship in your field of interest would provide you with similar experience to research (and the crucial rec letter).</p>