I’m graduating college this May and wanted to take a year off before applying to graduate school. I want to do research at the university that I want to go to grad school. I was thinking of messaging a professor and asking if I could do research for him after graduating for a year. Is that a common thing? Has anyone ever heard of someone doing this or who’s done it?
I’ve heard of it happening but really only to people with whom said professor is already familiar. Otherwise, the professor basically has to pay a higher rate for a full-time employee that is no more competent than a much cheaper first-year graduate student.
There may be exceptions, but generally this doesn’t happen a lot. It doesn’t make very good economic sense.
My son did this for almost two years.
In my field it happens all the time, but you often don’t get paid unless you’re the lab manager.
In many fields (psychology included) labs hire lab managers/research coordinators to manage the administrative aspects of research in the lab. You complete IRB forms, arrange participants, order new supplies, etc. You also may get involved in research and writing papers or presenting. My psychology lab in grad school had 4 different lab managers; three of them went on to great programs in psychology and the fourth one is applying this year, after 3-4 years as a lab manager. Some research groups have a variety of positions - my research group in my other field, public health, had a couple of research coordinators who had different tasks.
In the health sciences, some labs have paid research assistants/technicians. They do full-time work alongside the graduate students and postdocs. This often happens at medical centers and such were easy access to well-trained undergraduates is low but there aren’t enough graduate students and postdocs to do the work. A friend’s partner did this kind of work for 2-3 years before going into a PhD program.
Many people do volunteer for several years after college to work in a lab, although of course you will need a day job to pay the bills. If you do want to do full-time research work and you can’t find a position at a university, you can also look (for the social sciences) at think tanks, NGOs, and nonprofits, or (for the natural/physical sciences) at national labs, military research installations, pharmaceutical companies, and independent medical research labs.
That’s exactly what I did. I have been working for my prof and his team for two years after college graduation. This was possible because the project I am engaged in was a long-term (around 5 years).