Advice on summer research?

[futureapppsy2]

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Hi all,

I've been lucky enough to be offered two unpaid research positions for this summer--one in multicultural child psych and one in multicultural/disability adjustment psych. The latter is in my home state/town; the former isn't. The child psych professor starts a sabbatical in mid-July, so my initial plan was to spend about half the summer working with him and then go home and spend the rest of my summer working with the disability adjustment professor. Both have been very kind and have told me that publications are likely (not guaranteed, of course) to come out of my work with them.

The disability adjustment professor probably aligns better with my research interests, but I am applying to mostly school psych programs, so having child psych research, especially a publication, might be good. My questions are: Does it make more or less sense to split my time in terms of opportunities and productivity? Also, I would have to pay for housing during my time working with the child psych professor but won't while working the disability adjustment lab (would live with family). On the other hand, I feel as though I've already made a commitment of sorts to work with the child psych professor and would be extremely loath to break that.

Advice? I'm intrinsically interested in both labs...

 

[Ollie123]

I'd go with the disability one, personally. Few reasons:
1) As you said, it fits in better with your interests
2) Its easy to get SOME experience showing you can work with children. Much easier then getting good research experience in such a specialized area. Pretty much every school has at least 1 child psychologist and many far more. I don't know of very many places with ANYONE who studies disability.
3) Financial benefits

I would not try and do both. It would be hard to make a publication-worthy contribution over the course of a single summer, let alone half a summer. Good research projects can take years to complete, and personally, I think a couple months is far too short a time to really get a whole lot out of it, even if you are planning on doing it full-time for those few months.

As for backing out...that is tricky, but it depends on how your conversations have gone, if they were relying on you to complete run a project, versus just another body to get the work done, etc.

 

[ladysky61]

I agree with Ollie. Obviously it would nice to be able to save some money (are you getting funded by your school or anything?) and if you aren't super interested in the first project, I just don't see the point. The other reason is that I am assuming you want a LOR out of this (as well as a possible publication) and it would be really hard for a professor to write you a good and informative LOR with less then 2 months experience.

Don't break your time up is my opinion.

As for backing down, there is still a month until you would start working right? I say its not too late. This might be harder if you always committed, but if you just expressed an interest, I don't see the problem.

 

[futureapppsy2]

Its easy to get SOME experience showing you can work with children. Much easier then getting good research experience in such a specialized area. Pretty much every school has at least 1 child psychologist and many far more. I don't know of very many places with ANYONE who studies disability

Actually, my university is the opposite--we have several people who work with disability, and only one person who works with child psych (and his work involves parenting psych, not actual child participants). I will have volunteer experience working with children, however.