Undergrad research (neuro) and PhD admissions?

vdrumm
Sun, 14 Sep 2014 23:59:11 +0000

I’m sorry for the incoming wall of words and my general cluelessness.

I’m a Junior, with prospective double majors in biology and neuroscience, and hopes for a PhD and career in research. I transferred to my current university as a sophomore, from a school with no neuro program and almost no opportunities for lab research, and it left me a little behind.

I’m currently trying to decide which of two neuro labs I should commit to, as neither are perfectly in sync with my interests (which still need hashing out, to be fair) but one is probably more likely to give me relevant skills and knowledge of useful techniques.

So here is my conundrum:

Lab #1 hired me a week ago, before I’d even heard back from lab #2. They study social psych with EEG, which is far more soft-science than my hopeful path of research and wouldn’t seem to give me any techniques or methods I’d be likely to use again (I’d like to study cephalopods, and almost certainly not humans). It would at least give me a thesis in neuro, and it’s possible I could supplement it with more relevant summer work (an REU, ideally).
They are also a very young lab, the professor only having arrived last year, and have yet to actually support an undergraduate thesis, to my knowledge, so I don’t know if I should be worried about that.

Lab #2 studies visual system development in ferrets, and interests me much more. However, the professor has told me that the only opportunity available is with a grad student who won’t be able to meet with me until October, and that he finds it unlikely that I’d be able to complete a thesis in such little time, as most students he works with accumulate all of their data by the end of their junior year (how??). However, I could theoretically help out with said grad student’s project instead of a thesis.

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TL;DR

I don’t know whether I have any chance of a thesis in lab #2, and I don’t know if a thesis in lab #1 would be worth anything in my desired path.
I don’t know if begging and pleading with lab #2 to let me try for a thesis and committing my summer over to them (or forfeiting the thesis and just working on someone else’s project) would be any better than doing a thesis with lab #1, and allotting my summer to some cool REU.
I don’t know if having so little research experience has already sealed my fate and my only chance at admission to a decent PhD program will be to take several years off in between, anyway.
I don’t know if I’m making mountains out of molehills and that translating a thesis in human neuropsych to a more-strongly-neuro, animal-using grad program will be more doable than I realize.

Thanks for your feedback!