<p>The easiest way is to wait a while, don’t rush the process. You don’t know how a professor is, what is personalities are and how demanding he/she is. First wait until your son gets to Rice. Many student’s don’t start until their second semester when they have built up a connection with a professor through class or has gotten to know a department. He will also have had access to people working primarily to help students find undergraduate research on campus. Trying to figure things out right now is kind of a gamble. You won’t have the ability to interview the professor, see his/her lab, talk to people working in his lab. Of course some people go in blind and get a good lab, but there are people that join a lab and realize it is really really boring or they don’t like the strictness of their professor. It’s good to be able to talk to other people and get a feel of what kind of person the professor is. The last thing you want to have happen is to jump into something early on, devote much time on it and then realize it’s not working out for you. Not all labs are created equal.</p>