<p>Futurebiomom, your husband is absolutely correct- how your daughter performs in undergrad will be judged by the research she does. There is a bit of subtlety here that you might want to pay attention to. Some schools, like my alma mater UW Madison, have a culture that encourages undergrads to get into labs early. I remember taking a course that introduced me to the research in several departments during the first semester of college. I also had classes where famous researchers would give single lectures about there work. Undergrad lab jobs were easy to come by and almost always, included their own project.</p>
<p>In contrast, my sister recently attended CU in Boulder and had a very different experience. At CU, undergrad lab jobs were reserved for those individuals with work study hours (a form of financial aid) and this meant that students from well off families had little chance to get a lab job, much less a good one. She described lab jobs in labs that paid the students out of the general funds felt that they needed to get something tangible out of the students ie. dishwashing, autoclaving, preparing buffers, rather than a research project. Maybe this is because the medical campus of CU is located an hour away and so there is less biological science research in the area, maybe it’s because CU does a lousy job of supporting its research, maybe it’s observer bias by a jaded little sister.</p>