Hello! I’m a junior in high school right now and I’m looking at schools. I mostly care about the research-friendliness of the program when I look at universities. For me, the teaching ability of the professors isn’t very important because I’ve been able to teach myself a lot of graduate level topics without the help of any mentor. Unfortunately, for doing any nano-fabrication or materials science research, I’ll be kind of screwed if I don’t have access to the facilities of a heavily funded university. At the same time, I’d hate to go somewhere like Stanford (which still charges for facility use) and max out my credit cards with debt if I don’t get funded, substrates are expensive after all. http://snf.stanford.edu/join/FY16ServiceCenterRates.pdf
I would like a place which lacks bureaucratic constraints in facility use. I want to take a sample, go down to the lab, and hop on a SEM without having to go through the tedious process of filing a request and paying outrageous fees (substrates are still REALLY expensive).
I’m sure I’ll have to pay a little for doing research, but at the same time, the only reason I’m going to college is for doing that, I can educate myself, but I can’t buy a $5 million MFM myself. Rather than spending $50,000 a year for tuition and housing and then ending up spending $50,000 for research, I’d be better off using the university facilities as an outsider.
Any ideas on universities where I can do that? I’ve spoken to some admissions officers regarding this, and all of them gave me the generic “well, you can talk to your professor and work with them on your project”. While that is very true, it still doesn’t help because it says nothing about the school’s ability to support my research. Does anybody know of how I can determine how good a university is for doing research?
I suppose if my research is seen as important, it will be funded and supported by the school, but at the same time, that means if I’m working on something which is not perceived as important, it will not be funded and I’ll be on my own. I don’t intend to do any studies on underwater pogo-sticking dynamics, but I won’t be doing that much fundamental work either, I’m more of an applied research guy (although, underwater pogo-sticking would be a pretty interesting CFD simulation).
Any suggestions on schools I should check out that are like this?
If you would like to respond with the term “nowhere” appearing anywhere in your response, be sure to leave a bad pun so your comment will be somewhat productive. I love puns.
I don’t think you understand the way research is conducted or funded in the academic world. Funding is key and undergraduates students typically don’t get funding on their own. You will need to work with a faculty member whether you have funding or not.
You seem think you are already an intellectual peer, or even above the intellect, of your future professors. My suggestion is to slow down and learn from your professors.
When you are at the cutting edge like many of the universities, things go a lot slower and every place has funding constraints, through some are more flexible than others. You will not be able to educate yourself simply because the knowledge you seek is not yet documented. I would look to the large, research oriented engineering universities like Michigan, Purdue, Rice, GT, Cal etc… look at grants and budgets, major professionals in the field and you will probably get a little closer. As far as access, you would probably be working on a team of faculty, grad, and undergrad students if you attend one of those schools. When my son did an Material Science internship at Michigan this summer, undergrads were restricted from using certain hazardous materials (toxic heavy metals, etc) so you may also run into constraints there.
I would not discount schools like Princeton or Hopkins either because of the tremendous opportunities for undergraduate research there and the smaller number of graduate students.
You would be best off combing the literature for interesting papers and finding out where the authors teach, perhaps contacting them to get more information, then making a short list.
Personally, if OP came to my lab with the perceived “holier than thou” attitude of not wanting to work with others and thinking nobody can offer him anything of intellectual value… I wouldn’t take him.
Thanks TooOld4School, I will check those places out. The journals I read are mostly written by researchers in China or South Korea, but I’ll start paying more attention to which schools have the most published papers now.
No puns here. Let me give you the perspective of a physics professor whose research is in nanoscience/technology. I have had many undergraduate students in my labs doing research over the years. It is a great experience for the students and sometimes they even publish papers. Most of them graduate and go on to a graduate program before they can complete the work to publish. This is because as Freshmen, they cannot really contribute to a research program and they are very busy with courses. By the time they reach their Junior year, they can really make a contribution, if they stay with the same lab instead of testing the waters elsewhere.
Occasionally I have seen students come in and say that they are ready for research and they don’t need to learn anything in classes. This is usually a recipe for disaster as they soon find out that doing research in materials science or physics is much more than tinkering around with expensive equipment. Furthermore, they have a really hard time with classes because they have not learned how to study and do well in that kind of environment. This is a real problem when they try to apply for graduate school. Of course, you may be the exception to this rule but don’t go into college minimizing what you can learn in courses.
As for your question. Many universities have what we call the [Idea Shop](Home) at Illinois Tech. That is a laboratory that is available to support student projects and it is free of charge. Access to more sophisticated equipment can also be obtained without charge in some cases. Anyway, it sounds like you might be looking for a technical university like those in the [url=“<a href=“http://theaitu.org%22%5DAITU%5B/url”>http://theaitu.org”]AITU[/url] many of which are research universities but still relatively small and where you can work closely with faculty. Good luck!
^I’m going to agree with @xraymancs (I have my PhD and have worked with undergraduate research assistants in the lab).
Most university professors would be thrilled to have an undergraduate who is truly ready to start doing higher-level research, or who has already. Occasionally we will get students who are very gifted or whose parents are well-connected and started doing research in high school. As long as they are humble, remain teachable and open-minded, and are willing to take direction they’re usually a delight in the lab. They have great ideas, do more of the work than is usually expected from an undergrad RA and may contribute to a paper (or even do real co-authorship of one, which happens more often these days).
But, I agree with xraymancs in the sense that many undergrads don’t understand what it means to be truly capable of doing higher-level research. It’s not just being able to put some samples in the right machines - while that can be helpful in the lab, that’s technician level work. It’s really about the creativity of coming up with your own ideas, the methodological expertise of rigorously designing your own experiments, and the skills to analyze and interpret that research.
Taking direction is also important. In academia, nobody works without a mentor. Graduate students are mentored by postdocs and professors; postdocs are mentored by faculty and junior faculty are mentored by senior faculty. Current professors are the gatekeepers of the field - you don’t get into graduate school without the recommendation of professors (and they do include your interpersonal skills and mesh with the lab in their recommendation), and you don’t graduate with a PhD without the say-so of your committee. Further success in science also depends on how well you collaborate with others.
Also, quite frankly, I would be really, really skeptical of a college freshman who skipped into the lab and said that they had already taught themselves graduate-level topics without any guidance from a mentor. I’d wonder how well they really knew the topics they thought they’d taught themselves, and I would be concerned that they’d be difficult to work with.
That said, every university with shared resources charges for facility use. I mean, they have to keep the lights on somehow. But you don’t pay for it yourself; the principal investigator of your laboratory/research group has an overhead budget (facilities & administration) on their grant that pays for their facilities use. That’s why you have to work in a lab with a professor and a group. Even advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows do this, so a college student is no different. (That’s also where you gt access to the substrates and other materials you need.)
There is NO university that lacks bureaucratic constraints. NONE, and NUN for the Jesuit schools (there’s your pun). If you don’t want to deal with bureaucracy please don’t go into academic science. Your career will be a panoply of paperwork, administration and boring boring meetings. You have to do that stuff to get to the science, trust me.
And no, you cannot use university facilities as an outsider. You have to have some affiliation with the university in order to even be able to pay for facilities usage. There is a such thing as a 0% appointment (the university does not pay your salary; you get a free affiliation so you can use the library and facilities and maybe an office but that’s it) BUT you usually have to have a PhD and a substantial grant and some compelling reason why you aren’t already affiliated with some institution for that.
That’s how research funding works in general in science. You have to justify why your research is important to the agency that is funding you and what kind of mind-blowing world difference it’s going to make. NIH, NSF, nonprofits, foundations…they all want the same thing: research that is meaningful to them and the people who give them money (taxpayers for the NIH and NSF; donors for the nonprofits and foundations; shareholders for any for-profit organizations).
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HOWEVER, if
you are willing to work in a laboratory under the supervision of a principal investigator (and perhaps a postdoc and/or graduate student); and
you really are that rare advanced undergrad who is ready to take on some semi-advanced research; and
the research you already know that you are interested in is expensive and requires lots of equipment
you will probably want to attend a top-tier research university. That includes a lot of excellent private and public universities. If you already know what you want to do, you can surf the websites of relevant departments and see what professors are doing what kind of research. You can then look those professors up on NIH Reporter (I’m sure that NSF has an equivalent tool) and see what grants they have gotten funded recently to see what kind of work they are doing. (The NIH has lots of pages explaining their different grant mechanisms and how much money they are; I’m sure you can figure it out.)
@sinaroughani I guess what everyone is saying is plan on being a student, learn how to play nice in the sandbox, take some courses in history and other humanities to learn how to write and construct a persuasive argument, play some sports…
Oh yes, learn diplomacy.
So my reference to the Jesuits had a purpose. Galileo probably wouldn’t have been convicted of heresy and locked up for life had he been more aware of the politics in the scientific community, which at the time was funded by the Pope. A slower and more sensible approach with the Pope’s Jesuit scientists could have helped him very much.
Many of the greatest scientists are/were poets, historians, theologians, athletes, artists, musicians, etc. Respect that.
Many very brilliant scientists wonder why in their mid-career they report to a scientist or engineer with very average scientific credentials. They wind up reporting to people that can manage a process, manage people and manage resistance.
Thank you for the informative reply, juillet, I particularly liked your pun. I guess I’d be okay with some paperwork. I’d definitely be okay with learning from mentors, too. Can you think of any good institutions in particular? I was thinking the U of Minnesota, Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Michigan, UC-Berkeley, and UCLA because of their size and resources. Do these sound like good research institutions?
I’ll see what the NSF thinks about an underwater pogo-sticking CFD simulation.
