<p>
[quote]
Hopefully you have a little bit of background, so that you can get into a short technical discussion and impress the professor.
[/quote]
sky: I doubt that I have the kind of background you referred to. I haven't volunteered in a lab before, nor have I finished all my sophomore courses. I'm going into my second year this September.</p>
<p>If you volunteer 10~15 hours per week, how many extra out-of-lab hours, if any, should you put in every week? Are you required to do out-of-lab work at all?</p>
<p>I've been working in a lab for almost a year now, and have been mainly doing an independent project and consulting with some post-docs at the same time. There has been absolutely no grunt work, although my work is computational so that rules out any chances of washing glassware. I made it clear from the beginning that my goal was to go for academia, and that I wanted to publish a paper as an undergrad. If you want to avoid doing busy work, then you want to emphasize to the PI clearly what your objectives are and repeat it at every meeting until the PI is thinking along the same lines. In fact, the post-docs I'm working with are already thinking that the first paper should be submitted to a decent journal, not solely for grad school admissions, but also for faculty interview I will probably face in 8 years. Now that is already much more ambitious than I was originally thinking, but lets me know that everyone is thinking along the same lines.</p>
<p>Do whatever hours that FIT in your schedule. BUT, you know it would not interfere with your studies. You don't want it to hurt your gpa if you stay too focus on it. I would say 5-10 hours a week is good, considering 2.5 hours for 2 days a week or 2 hours everyday....</p>
<p>cherrybarry: Thanks for your post. I thought it was a little inappropriate to say explicitly that you want to publish a paper as an undergrad, but I guess I was wrong. I'll try what you suggested.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I would say 5-10 hours a week is good,...
[/quote]
eva10127: Does that 5-10 hours include both the lab work and the out-of-lab work?</p>
<p>^^ yeah...</p>
<p>So far, I haven't told my lab prof and grad students how many hours I'm going to put in every week, but I'm guessing it could be anywhere from 10 to 15 hours.
To maximize my chance of being able to receive my own project and publish papers as an undergrad, what are some of the best things I can do besides
-working hard
-being careful and consistent
-asking questions about anything I'm unsure of</p>
<p>
[quote]
what are some of the best things I can do besides [...]
[/quote]
</p>
<p>As was already stated, most importantly: be reliable (be on time to work, be on time to meetings, answer emails and other communications quickly and accurately, document all of your work, etc.). If you have a task to be completed by the next meeting, make sure it's completed by the next meeting... the "I had a test" excuse won't work. Those are the types of excuses that get undergrads stuck with the grunt work.</p>
<p>The other big thing is to take on challenges when given the opportunity. You will be hired to do one job. Never sacrifice your first priority, but always be on the lookout where you can take on newer and more difficult opportunities. At meetings, there will always be stumbling blocks and issues that crop up. If you think you can help, then say so. When they see that you have moved from glassware cleaner to problem solver, you can get ever-increasing responsibilities.</p>
<p>I asked my lab prof 1) whether there will be an opportunity for me to contribute toward a publishable paper, 2) how much I will be responsible for, and 3) whether I will get my own publishable project to work on. He said that it's hard to know for sure; it depends on your aptitudes and abilities. He will be in a much better position to answer those questions after I've worked with his lab team for a few weeks. In general, they can often find a project that will lead to a publication, but there is no way of predicting how much time it might eventually take.</p>
<p>The lab prof is an old guy who has 15+ years of experience in his field. He is the Canadian Research Chair in Genomics. Currently the lab has exactly 6 grad students and 6 staffs (research assistants?). It's planned that I'll be paired up with a staff and assist him. A lab staff told me that the lab previously had and currently has many volunteers who volunteered 2~4 hours per week. It surprised me that 2~4 hours seemed to be the norm in this lab for those volunteering.</p>
<p>Judging by the lab prof's answers to my questions and the lab's atmosphere, does this lab look like a good place where there's a high chance that, as an undergrad, you'll get the credit you deserve for all the time and hard work you sacrifice, receive your project and get published?</p>
<p>An extremely interesting thread. I'm going through the same thing right now. I'm going to tell my professor that I can only do 8-10 hours a week. I'm not going to sacrifice my GPA for research especially so early on in my degree (I'm still a sophomore).</p>
<p>I hate to sound like the cynical graduate student I clearly am, but getting a research job is not about getting the credit you "deserve", and simply putting in a great deal of time and effort will not ensure that your project is publishable or noteworthy.</p>
<p>I don't think publication should be viewed as the logical end result of undergraduate research.</p>
<p>And as a sidenote,
[quote]
I'm not going to sacrifice my GPA for research especially so early on in my degree (I'm still a sophomore).
[/quote]
It is likely that, from a grad school admissions standpoint, you are better off sacrificing your GPA for research. That doesn't mean it's a choice you'll have to make, or that you should do research full-time and attend classes as an afterthought, but if the choice is between a few tenths of a point of GPA and a few hours a week in the lab, you're almost certainly better off, statistically speaking, choosing the lab.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
It is likely that, from a grad school admissions standpoint, you are better off sacrificing your GPA for research. That doesn't mean it's a choice you'll have to make, or that you should do research full-time and attend classes as an afterthought, but if the choice is between a few tenths of a point of GPA and a few hours a week in the lab, you're almost certainly better off, statistically speaking, choosing the lab.
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>Thanks for the pointer molliebat! I'll see how I do for the first Quarter and then I might do more if I feel like I'm able to. While we're on the topic (sorry OP if I'm hijacking the thread) what are your opinions on the NSF REU
(National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates)? I mean do you think its a good idea to do one?? thanks!</p>
<p>I started volunteering in a lab this Monday. It's decided that I'll be working 15 hours per week. On the first day, I was assigned to two grad students, each of whom is going to take turns to teach me basic lab techniques and telling me what to do.
As expected, I'm only doing grunt work since my first day. Not necessarily cleaning beakers, because this lab doesn't use beakers that much, but nobrainer work nonetheless. It's just in a different form: preparing food (bacteria) for C. elegans, the model organism of this lab. I hope I'll move up the research food chain quickly and start doing intellectual work sooner.
Anyway, during volunteering in the lab, I have many questions that pop up, but I hesitate to ask them to the grad students responsible for training me. They're not very nice or friendly and they're hard to approach; in consequence, I'm forced to repress my desire to quench my curiosity. I feel they're going to eat me if they think my question is stupid. I'm aware that being afraid to ask questions is one of the biggest handicaps, but I just can't help it.
Also, there are quite a few volunteers in the lab; I have a feeling that they're treating me as just another volunteer, not as an individual. I don't feel much valued or welcomed. Is this how volunteers are usually treated? So far, I don't like the lab atmosphere that much. :( Any advice?</p>
<p>what really matters is your level of contact with the principal investigator. if there is next to none right now and future contact seems unlikely/far too hard and taxing to establish, this is probably a bad position for you. but i'm tempted so say the vast majority of labs are like the one you've described. try to find a small lab with a nice PI - that's the best combo as far as i can tell.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yea, I haven't seen any figures myself, but that sounds about right. I'm in engineering and not the sciences, but I can't think of any of my peers coming into graduate school that had published papers. There might be 1 or 2 that had papers published in the industry's 'Student Journal' publication, but that's not terribly interesting.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If you are applying with a B.S. only (which may be normally the case in biology for example), then I think you won't be normally expected to have a publication. If however you have already completed a research master's degree prior to applying for a PhD program, then having a conference publication is by no means extraordinary.</p>
<p>Superwizard,</p>
<p>This talk by someone who has been involved in the grad admissions process in several top universities seems to indicate that, in some cases, "sacrificing" your GPA to do research might not be such a bad idea.</p>
<p>Now it's been almost two months, ~100 hours (15 hours per week), since I first started volunteering in a lab. I'm unhappy with my experiences so far. What's weird is that, even though I'm the only volunteer in this lab who puts in as many as 15 hours to volunteering and I keep being consistent and hardworking, I'm given same types of work as other volunteers who volunteer less than 7 hours per week; the "research work" I've been doing was only grunt work. I'm starting to feel that it's not worthwhile to devote this much time to this because I'm getting nowhere. I'm aware that it's common for undergrad volunteers to do a lot of these grunt work (entering data, programming, pipetting, wet lab work, etc.) as part of a research team, but I doubt that the current lab's grad students or PI (who is indifferent of me, and doesn't even seem to or care to know who I am) will starting giving me intellectual, publishable work to do. Would it be better to decrease my volunteer hours to less than 7 because volunteering many hours like 15 doesn't make much difference?</p>
<p>You seem obsessed with "publishable work" and equate that to being productive research which is totally off. Research that helps you understand background even if it is grunt work will help develop your background. I went back and looked at your posts. I can't believe you actually asked your PI if there was opportunity for published work? Never be that frank as it makes you look superficial as hell. Ultimately getting published will depend on your ability. Doing grunt work and asking questions will help but only if you are smart enough to do original research and actually learn from the "grunt work" you are doing.</p>
<p>ysk1,</p>
<p>I do not want to come off as excessively crude but you are quite delusional. 100 research hours is equivalent to the existence of homo sapien, in relation to the universe. Any training that you get in a lab is valuable and promotes your future, and publication is a nice punctuation of that but is never a guarantee. Do you think that every project that your colleagues in lab are working on gets published? really now? Do you think publishable data is all "intellectual" and not hard work, bent over the bench pipetting, preparing solutions, going dizzy on the microscope, going insane on the microtome etc.?
You don't yet have any skills to contribute to a publication so why would the PI give you your own project yet or much less give you preferential treatment?</p>
<p>If you want more interaction with your PI which seems advantageous to you, join a smaller lab and then maybe you'll get more responsibility because there will be a smaller pool of trained people. Maybe then you'll at least get your name on an abstract/poster. Good luck to you, but wake up it can take years to assemble publishable data, most of which is "grunt work" and difficult.</p>
<p>Have to agree with autocell on this one. Of course I would want to know whether there was opportunity for publishing before I started a project! (Granted, it's usually obvious once you know what your project is whether it could result in a paper, or just you being someone's b---h for 2 years, but if I had to, I would ask.) There are a lot of opportunities out there, and I would not settle for one where I knew I would just be the guy doing the genetic screen or doing the histology, who maybe gets a mention in the Acknowledgments section but is never a coauthor. No way in hell!</p>
<p>Grunt work is better than nothing, but it is clearly inferior to also doing everything else that goes into a publication.</p>