I am going to be applying to graduate schools for engineering. I have done some research, the most notable of which has been for one of the engineering professors at my home institution. It is highly unlikely I will publish anything before applying to schools, but I am wondering if the research I have done would be considered notable for application committees. The reason that I wonder this is because my professor’s goals for my research were never to publish (as far as I know), but to work with a small business under a small business grant grant. He has set up collaboration with the business, and I kicked off the project from the start with the professor under phase I funding. I initially did some finite element analyses, and based partly on the results that I produced, the company is obtaining additional funding. I am expecting to begin developing an actual hardware product soon. Is this information likely to be interesting committees or would it be considered pretty generic?
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It’s actually pretty uncommon for undergrads to publish before getting into graduate school, so don’t worry about not having publications.
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It sounds like your research will be advantageous to applying to graduate programs that care about research. At your stage, it doesn’t really matter what your professor’s end goal is; what matters is the skills you’ve learned while working with him - the basic research process, how a lab works, how to do research, certain conventions about academic research, etc. Lots of students get that experience outside of university research labs at companies and summer internships and such, so the fact that this is for a business rather than to publish in an academic journal probably won’t make too much of a difference at this stage.