How to approach research opportunities?

[deleted357625]

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I'm interested in doing some psychology research work, but how can i get the opportunity to work with someone, do you contact schools or certain health centers asking?
How does this work.

Or overall, how do you get the opportunity to work with anyone related to research work?
I'm a premed majoring in psych so i thought research work associated with the major is relevant.

 

[Richardh]

i always thought psychology majors have plenty of opportunity to do research? i am not a psych major but i remember while taking psych classes during my undergrad i needed to do some extra-credit work. so i signed up as a volunteer for some psych experiments that some of the post-docs listed at the psych dept were working on for their research paper.

but back to your question i think the best way for you to find out research opportunity is to go to your psych dept office (or school of psychology) and ask for the list of professors who welcome undergraduate research. you will most likely be paired up with a post-doc, but the professor will overlook your work.

if you don't want to do psych related research, check out your school's bio dept office (or school of biological sciences).

 

[flakpilot]

What I did is that I took a psych class and the very first day of class the professor mentioned she was going to start doing research hopefully during the semester. I kept that in mind and did well in her class and I asked her a couple of weeks before ending the semester if she needed any help with her research and told her I was very interested in doing some psych research. We started meeting to discuss the research she was working on, set up to do an independent study for the following semester, presented at a symposium and thanks to that we won a grant to start another research project and now i'm getting paid as an RA through this grant. So best way for me is just find out what your professor is up to, if he or she is doing research focus on doing well in the class and showing your interested and work yourself up from there. Good luck!

 

[NickNaylor]

1) Ask professors whose classes you do well in if they're willing to take on a student for research. You'll probably have to start with scut work, but usually there's a progression as you spend more and more time with a lab. If you do well, you'd likely get your own project to work on.

2) Do a summer research program. A list of these can be found here: https://www.aamc.org/members/great/61052/great_summerlinks.html