What exactly counts as Research Experience?

juillet
Sun, 04 Nov 2012 01:41:15 +0000

Don’t think of research experience as a black-or-white category - a box to check, or something that’s either/or. It’s more like a continuum. There are many ways to get research experience and some are better than others. Cleaning pipettes in a lab is research experience, but that’s not as good as doing literature searches for a graduate student, which is not as good as running participants, which isn’t as good as helping to develop a measure or writing a grant or an independent thesis.

Admissions committees care about the kinds of experiences that indicate you may be successful in graduate school. Cleaning pipettes means you were around other researchers and observed the research process, but you may have an idealistic or distanced idea of how it actually works. Writing your own thesis, however, or helping a professor author a grant means you’ve been intimately involved in several different aspects of the research process in an independent manner. Not only does it show that you more likely to be able to successfully do those things in graduate school, it also betters the chances you won’t get disillusioned when you see what research is really about.

So if your field is generally about developing mobile applications, then your experience is probably research experience.

Getting on a publication as an undergrad is a combination of luck and talent, and a few other things. First of all, you have to be lucky enough to enter a project at the right time - a time in which a publication is being written, and you are catching them early enough to get in on the publication and get credit. (If you are in a very productive lab, this is more common than if you are not.) Then you have to be talented enough for the author(s) to want your assistance. The best thing to do is, if you have been in the lab for at least a few months and have been involved in a specific research project, ask your PI or others more senior than you if they are planning a publication out of this project and if so, if you can help write it. If they aren’t (which is unlikely), you can propose one, but make sure that it’s good and take some time to think about it.

But don’t just amble into a lab and ask if there are publication opportunities. You have to do the time first.