Research advice?

[majestic red]

I'm about a month away from starting my senior year and I'm in the application process this cylce. Most of my research experiences have been full-time summer internships. Two of them were in academia, and the PI from one of these experiences has informally promised me co-authorship on a paper whenever it actually comes out. The third, which I'm doing right now, is in industry, and I might be able to get a paper out of this as well.

During the school year last year, I worked about 6-7 hrs/wk in a lab on campus on a drug screening project... basically just taking a whole bunch of random compounds and incubating cancer cells in them to see if they die It wasn't the most exhilirating project, but the goal was to narrow it down to 1-2 compounds that seemed like good candidates, and then to study their mechanisms of action. My PI was pretty inattentive and didn't seem to have much interest in mentoring/guiding me. I contacted him recently to ask, basically, if it would be worth going back to his lab this coming school year, and he basically told me "I'm waiting on results, talk to me again in 7 weeks."

I'm reluctant to go back to his lab, since I wasn't impressed by what I was working on last year. Also, after telling him that I'd stay to work with him over the summer, I took a last-minute internship elsewhere because he didn't have the funding to pay me, and I couldn't afford to stay on campus without pay, so I'm a little worried that he thinks I'm flaky. However, I would be interested if the whole mechanism of action stuff actually came to be.

Anyway, my question is, do you think I should hold out and see if this PI ends up having a good project for me? Or do you think I should just try to find another lab to work in? I know that my research experiences thus far have been pretty brief and I'd like to stay with my PI to "show commitment," but I don't want to end up wasting another year doing something unproductive.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[UVAbme2009]

Go somewhere else. It sounds like you don't want to be at the lab and he doesn't really care if you're there or not.

 

[majestic red]

Go somewhere else. It sounds like you don't want to be at the lab and he doesn't really care if you're there or not.

The PI definately doesn't care if I'm there or not, but I'm afraid that it's too late for me to get anything meaningful done, since I only have a year left. I also feel like I've wasted a year of research and feel like the only way to make it worthwhile is if I continue the project... Maybe it would be worthwhile to talk to the PI at the begining of the school year, and then try to find other labs if it doesn't sound it it'll work out? I don't know...

 

[Jolie South]

The PI definately doesn't care if I'm there or not, but I'm afraid that it's too late for me to get anything meaningful done, since I only have a year left. I also feel like I've wasted a year of research and feel like the only way to make it worthwhile is if I continue the project... Maybe it would be worthwhile to talk to the PI at the begining of the school year, and then try to find other labs if it doesn't sound it it'll work out? I don't know...

If you can get paid and work with a great mentor, why not see if that will work out?

A publication is not the end goal here. It's developing the tools to design and complete experiments. It's obvious that you have little involvement in this in your current lab.

move on.