I’m currently a Junior in high school and I’m searching for colleges with good research opportunities.
What criteria/statistics should I be using to narrow down this list? In other words, what makes a college good for a prospective research scientist?
Should I be looking at the funding towards research or the type of labs professors are running?
If anyone has college suggestions or advice, it would be much appreciated!
Professional researcher will likely require an advanced degree–probably a PhD. Where you do your graduate degree will be more important than your undergraduate institution.
It might be helpful if you could be more specific about what fields you’re interested in. Good schools for astrophysics research won’t be the same as good schools for human cognition research.
A variety of undergrad schools offer good opportunities for future scientists, LACs as well as large state flagships, brand name private universities, tech schools, and even some lesser known state universities may offer excellent research opportunities for undergrad students. So it really depends on a lot of things but especially what type of science you’re interested in.
If you have any specific areas of interest, in mind it might be useful to look for professors who have publications in and maintain a research lab in those specific fields.
Looking at upper level coursework offerings will be useful as well. Bigger departments tend to offer a broader array of class topics than do tiny schools which only have a handful of professors in a particular department.
Funding is delicate topic right now. With huge cuts in federal NIH and NSF funding, even if a school has funding for XYZ research right now, they might not next year.
I think you can do research pretty much anywhere. At my kids two publics, there was definitely more opportunity than supply of interested kids. At others, it might be more competitive - like higher end schools.
Some schools will build research into their program. For example, College of Wooster is an LAC in Ohio that has research in their curriculum.
But I think you should find the school you want. They will no doubt have research opportunities.
Good luck.
Many schools will publish what percentage of undergrads engage in research and sometimes they will also indicate how many have lead to publication if you do some digging. Also, look at Honors programs as they will often include research opportunities.
Could you please do a Chance Me/Match Me thread and answer all of the questions. You will get far better guidance if you do this. We know nothing about you except that you want to do research of some kind.
The good news is as undergrad research opportunities have become more of an interest for more prospective students, many colleges have been investing in increasing these opportunities. So, investing in new research facilities, providing institutional funding for undergrad research (including summer research programs), and so on.
The bad news is this is an incredibly complex and dynamic situation, and determining the best possible colleges for you as an individual interested in research opportunities is not easy! Just by way of example, external funding grants for research don’t necessarily generate undergraduate research opportunities. They might, but they might not, and sometimes graduate students will get priority even if undergrads could technically qualify for funding. Sometimes you can then still do volunteer research positions, sometimes for credit in fact. And sometimes not.
Anyway, given these complexities, I agree it might make the most sense to do a full Match Me, so people can provide insights with more context to help narrow down options that might actually make sense for you.
As one approach, consider colleges by their science lab facilities:
It would be hard to go wrong with some of the included schools, such as Caltech, Harvey Mudd, Wooster, Trinity, Bates, Rice, Emory and Hamilton, at least as ideas to explore further.
In Australia, where I live, we generally have a good tertiary education system, like the USA. Some schools have recently introduced research-focused degrees (such as the Bachelor of Research or Bachelor of Philosophy). That said, a USA school (and a number of my professors went there when I went to college all those years ago), which is really known for undergraduate research, is a school many don’t even know about. Harvey Mudd. They have a friendly rivalry with Caltech (yes, they are in that class), but concentrate only on undergraduate students, which appeals to some. It is one of the few schools that Australian students consider studying at in the USA, rather than studying in Australia. I would definitely look into Harvey Mudd.
Here is an interesting video about research at Harvey Mudd:
Have you considered participating in a high school science fair? May find some helpful mentors locally.
We know two very successful 30 something researchers. In both cases, they found their research passion by working with a professor, and doing research in their undergrad labs. These professors than connected them to colleagues who were doing research at a higher level…and both got their doctorates and did post docs.
One got their undergrad degree at Lehigh. The other at University of Hartford. Coincidentally, both did their post docs at UPenn, but in very different fields.
So, I think the key is finding that research mentor who is doing research that piques your interest.
I just posted a match-me thread under the name: Match Me as a Junior who wants to be a research scientist and has no idea what schools are actually realistically going to accept them
In hindsight, I should’ve done that first!
The good news might be that a complete and honest answer to “college suggestions” could list at least a few hundred schools in the USA, and probably just as many outside the USA.
This makes it hard to suggest two or five or ten schools, but does provide lots and lots of options. There is quite a bit of research going on at a wide range of colleges and universities.
Research is generally the point of getting a PhD. However, if you look at students in pretty much any very good PhD program, you will find that they come from a huge range of different undergraduate colleges and universities. It is very common to get a bachelor’s degree at one college or university, and then if you are interested in research, get a graduate degree (such as a master’s degree or PhD) at a different university. It is also not all that unheard of for a very strong student to get a bachelor’s degree at an affordable university near home or in a location that they like, and then get a graduate degree at a university that is particularly well known for whatever specific subject the student is interested in. Also some students will have some work experience, hopefully in a research area, after they get their bachelor’s degree before they apply to graduate programs.
This brings up a different point. There are a wide variety of jobs that might be considered “research”. There are for example what I might think of as support jobs. Growing cells in a lab. Writing software. Cleaning up. Maybe even solving mathematical equations or applying statistics to lab results to analyze the data. However, in research it is almost inevitable that things will go wrong. Figuring out what went wrong and why and figuring out what the next experiment should be might in many cases require a greater understanding and more experience. Getting a bachelor’s degree gives a student quite a bit of useful knowledge of a field. A PhD teaches a person to take a more leading role in research. Some people might for example work for years helping with software engineering at a cyclotron or radio telescope without ever getting a PhD. In many cases their boss and also the person leading the experiment will have a PhD. Of course some people will start in the supporting roles with a bachelor’s degree, work for a year or a few years, and then go back to graduate school and get a more advanced degree.
To start: Your home state, your high school stats, your budget, and if possible what subjects you are good at and what subjects you like. This would give us a good place to start thinking about universities.
When a student goes off to university, they are often exposed to a huge number of opportunities that they might not have been aware even existed. This can help a student narrow down the specific area or areas that they are more likely to find interesting.
I am not sure whether this is needed for picking an undergraduate school to get a bachelor’s degree. We might just hope to find a school where a student is comfortable and where some interesting work is being done. However, finding an appropriate research mentor can be important for graduate programs. When my daughter was looking for PhD programs, this is pretty much what she did. She looked at specifically what specific research was being done by which specific professor at each university she was considering. This is something that OP (the student who started this thread) might not need to worry about for a few years, but when picking PhD programs to apply to finding the right research and the right research mentor is indeed an important part of the process.
The students I know actually found their graduate programs through the connections they made with the undergrad folks they did research with. This really was a help to them. The didn’t find the mentor before applying to undergrad, but once enrolled, they found a lab of interest…and took off from there.
I’ve heard about Harvey Mudd, but I did not know it was notable for undergraduate research. I’ll look into that, thanks!
Until you investigate your stats, desires and talk to your folks about a budget, that’s too early. Research is done most everywhere.
Figure out what you want in a school from cost, size, location, weather, sports, Greek life, major etc and go from there.
Mudd will be close to $100k a year full pay and is Ivy esque in admission difficulty.
Plus, they have an acceptance rate of 13%, much better than the usual suspects like the Ivies, Caltech (there is a long-standing rivalry between Caltech and Harvey Mudd), Stanford, etc., and is IMHO at least their equal.
OP (other thread) can afford $15-20K a year.
Until they know the need situation, there’s no point in talking about names.
If their need situation doesn’t match up, they’re not going to a school like Mudd.
Please continue the discussion on the OP’s Match Me thread: Match Me as a Junior who wants to be a research scientist and has no idea what schools are actually realistically going to accept them [NC resident, 4.0 GPA, top 5%, 35 ACT, 1520 SAT, <$15-20k, math or neuroscience]