How does Research work?

[ShadowHuskey]

This may seem ignorant but I don't understand what an Undergraduate student does in a professor's lab. From my understanding the professors generate the thesis and the students help test it. What kind activities do students do in labs? Is it essentially comprised of cleaning and menial tasks or are you actually part of the making of experiments and such? I also don't understand the process it takes to publish something. Do you need some kind of scientific breakthrough or can you simply just summarize your experiments. What does it mean when you are 2nd or 3rd author? Does the professor always get most of the credit? In other words can someone to explain how the process of research works. Thank you in advance!

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[Double Trouble]

This may seem ignorant but I don't understand what an Undergraduate student does in a professor's lab. From my understanding the professors generate the thesis and the students help test it. What kind activities do students do in labs? Is it essentially comprised of cleaning and menial tasks or are you actually part of the making of experiments and such? I also don't understand the process it takes to publish something. Do you need some kind of scientific breakthrough or can you simply just summarize your experiments. What does it mean when you are 2nd or 3rd author? Does the professor always get most of the credit? In other words can someone to explain how the process of research works. Thank you in advance!

1) Students work on the same projects that graduate students or researchers are working on; you might help the primary investigator (PI) on his research or he might assign you to some graduate students. It's whatever the head of the lab wants you to do - this can include washing dishes if you are unlucky. Eventually, you will be doing the same experiments the graduate students/researchers do.

2) You don't need a major breakthrough the publish. At the end of a study, the researchers decide if it worth publishing based on any new conclusions the data might reveal. If you have put enough effort towards the data acquisition, you may be listed as an author. The primary author usually does most of the work, while the secondary and tertiary authors contributed to a lesser extent.

3) Before you start working in a lab make sure you are going to have potential to be published. Ask your mentor if other undergraduate students in the lab typically publish during their duration in the lab.

 

[Quizlet04]

When I supervised students, I usually laid out what my research was about. Then, I'd let them think about a potential avenue for research on their own. Some succeeded better than others.

Remember two things when you get in there:

1) There's no guarantee your experiment is going to work. "Nothing useful at all is a possible outcome." That's just how science goes. Making sure you spend enough time in the lab will increase the chance that you get a usable result, but there is no way ahead of time to know what will happen.

2) Remember that you are there to HELP the research. I had a student who actively screwed up the work I needed to do. Contaminated data, didn't follow protocol, and basically wasted our time. I was incredibly annoyed after she left and vowed never to take on a student again.

 

[ChartaBona]

At my state university, the students did most of the lab-work. Generally you expanded on a former student's research. The professor nudges you along, steers you in the right direction, gives you objectives, tells you key-words to search in journal databases, etc. etc. We had to prepare our solutions, as well as clean up after our experiments, but cleaning up after someone else sounds more like a job than undergrad research.

Your experience really depends on the field and what sort of research you're performing. It's somewhat like the lab portion of a course in that specialty, except a lot longer, there isn't a lab manual, and you can't really predict what the results will be. Also, you're limited by funding, so someone has to apply for grants.

One small (dry-lab) portion of a research project I had was to find (Google ftw) a free molecular modeling program and figure out how to use it with the enzyme we were studying. It could be used to predict how the enzyme would bind with certain molecules. We were looking for potential competitive inhibitors in order to better understand the active site, but the substrate was too expensive to test any random theory. It was something like a dollar per mg. Eventually I got the program to spit out 3D images of how the enzyme and potential inhibitor might bind, along with some quantitative data that my biology major brain couldn't comprehend, haha. I graduated soon afterward. Unfortunately the prof put the enzyme-inhibitor project on hold to explore green chemistry, so I don't know if/when another student will follow up on what I did.