<p>I've heard 'do research do research do research' and yet I don't really know what it means to do research with a professor as an undergraduate liberal arts student. I can definitely picture the type of things a science major would do but I am clueless about what liberal arts (specifically government-ish) majors would do while assisting with research.....</p>
<p>Also if you were a prof would you find it creepy that a student read your book, your dissertation ( 393 pages) and around a dozen of your articles? Is that something you’d tell a professor in the initial first email you send to set up a meeting and whatnot?</p>
<p>I do research with my literature professor, and I never took a single one of her class. Because she said those classes were too rudimentary for my appetite. I just went to talk with her during her office hours and explained my interests in her field. She invited me to dinner and we talked about literature. Now I help her do power point and occasionally interpret lectures for guest speakers.
As for research component, I just read the stuff she assigned, and I will probably begin to publish stuff with her next year.</p>
<p>I have been a research assistant through two internships and a summer job. For the internships, I was working for an council that specializes in family news from sociologists and practitioners. I researched on government and non profit sites and wrote fact sheets and briefing papers on my findings. For my summer job, my teacher was writing a book and I got to search through old New York Times and Look and Ebony articles as well as find the odd random bits of info she needed from totally obscure references.</p>
<p>My experience: </p>
<p>Be a data monkey/ editor. </p>
<p>Input all the data.</p>
<p>Edit the damn thing 500 million times.</p>
<p>Ugh… grad school isn’t for me.</p>
<p>make bibliographies,
help them with your publications
a lot of b&*^^ work but it helps your research skills</p>
<p>Professors love it when you read their work. It’s not creepy at all, it’s actually very necessary if you want to seriously work with this person - they will have wanted to know that you are interested in the field and reading their work demonstrates your interest.</p>
<p>I’m in the social sciences. When I was an RA in uundergrad I started out doing simple data entry and analysis. It was very tedious and kind of boring, but it was a great first foray and I got a presentation out of it. After I had worked with my advisor for some time I moved up to helping her record pilot data and do some statistical analyses, and I worked with another advisor developing a codebook for qualitative research and doing some background literature reviews. Now I am a graduate research assistant and my duties are much more detailed and independent.</p>
<p>The best way to find out what expectations would be is to ask the professor you’d like to work with.</p>
<p>occupying the copying machine, get your hands dirty, and possibly entering all the data into softwares such as SPSS.</p>
<p>In psych, I’ve:
-entered data (minimal)
-ran participants through neuro assessments
-written/edited manuscripts/grants
-worked on project conceptualization
-interviewed participants
-done some basic analysis
-done lit searches
-extracted data from articles
-written IRB proposals
-been the project PI</p>
<p>How does one ask a professor about doing research? I’m in a small department with quite a few grad students. It doesn’t seem as though many (if any) undergrads do research for/with the professors of the type mentioned above.</p>
<p>I’m hoping to write an honors thesis in my final semester, but this would be my own research with a faculty adviser. Is that the same thing? It will be a lot more intense than data entry and making copies…</p>