Independent research?

Jweinst1
Tue, 13 May 2014 19:00:53 +0000

@Lilliana330‌

You need to define what you mean by “original research” and your own “project”. For any serious research project, that intends to be published in an academic journal, you need lab space to do that in, simply because there are machines that are needed, like an NMR spectroscopy machine which cost in the millions, much more than any grant could give you.

I go to Berkeley, and I work in a cancer biology lab. I have a specific project that I work on, that deals with testing new derivatives of a specific drug compound on prostate cancer cells. My project, however, correlates with the interests of the lab I am in, which are investigating the potential use of a class of organic molecules (beta amino indoles) in treatment for endocrine cancers. I call this project my own because I am the only one who works on it, and it is not going towards a grad student’s research thesis.

Whatever project you do or want to do, it can be your own, but has to be correlated to the interests of a lab on campus. I hope this makes more sense.