Publishing a research paper for the first time

hadsed
Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:28:24 +0000

What usually happens is that undergraduates can be a second or third author on a paper while being a research assistant to a professor at their university. There are very few fields where an undergraduate can actually do it all themselves unless they’ve been doing research for a few years. There’s really just too much to know when you’re talking about research because you have to come up with something that hasn’t been done before.

Now there are situations in which undergraduates can be first authors in papers. Most of the time this happens when you’re accepted to an REU or other internship for the summer and your professor thinks the research is good enough to submit to a journal. It could also work out this way if you’re doing research while you’re in school with a professor who’s willing to let you do most of the work, but this is with a lot of maybe’s (what field you’re in, what sort of research you’re doing in that field, what classes you’ve taken, how vast and deep your knowledge is of the field already, etc.).

This is all from the physics perspective. I would think that engineering would be even more difficult, because there are a lot of classes that you have to take before you can think about contributing anything serious, but you could say this is the case for any field. It takes some exceptional work, luck, and motivation to get published, but once you get lucky once or twice, it’s easy to keep the streak going. As long as you work hard to make sure you’re learning as much as you can as well as doing quality work, your professors/mentors will notice. Since you mentioned that you’ve been doing research during the school year, plus your national lab internship (which I didn’t think they made decisions on until March… but okay) it looks like your future’s looking pretty good. If you’re doing research for 4 years, you’re bound to get published some time if what you’re doing is worth anything and your professor isn’t just jerking you around and using you as cheap labor.