I’m about to enter my sophomore year and worked in a lab this past semester. I spent the semester helping to ear tag mice and prepare specimens to be sent for imaging. This upcoming semester, I would be moving to the portion of the lab where I would be scanning mice and making videos of the images. Is this considered research for med school or should I consider switching to a lab where I am more involved in the actual project? From what I understand, undergrads never get to do anything else besides imaging. I have never even met the PI of the lab before.
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2017
- Messages
- 182
- Reaction score
- 348
We have undergrad students in the lab I work at where they do exactly this. No, it isn’t research, you only do jobs researchers are too busy to do or is just annoying to do. It’s good experience tho to get into labs to do actual research where you have a project and run the experiments and if you’re lucky design them.
At my lab, if students want to, they can have a project in the summer since they can be there full time and the research requires long days. Maybe ask them if you can do that? Or part time during the year if the research permits it.
Good luck!
Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile
At my lab, if students want to, they can have a project in the summer since they can be there full time and the research requires long days. Maybe ask them if you can do that? Or part time during the year if the research permits it.
Good luck!
Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2010
- Messages
- 72,592
- Reaction score
- 115,585
What you're doing is grunt work, and you're definitely NOT testing a hypothesis, nor, it seem, about the scientific process.
You were doing lab technician work. Were you doing this as a work study assignment? Work study assignments tend to be lab technician work.
If I were you, I'd learn how to do the imaging, put that into your toolkit and then find research work in a different lab. You're more likely to get meaningful research through research for credit assignments or research where you're volunteering and not getting paid.
Paid undergraduate research for your home institution tends to be like what you've experienced where you're trained to carry out certain tasks and then assigned to do them repeatedly.
You should seek out a lab where you can carry out experiments for the purpose of resolving the validity of a hypothesis even if that work, initially, is heavily supervised by a grad student or postdoc.
It would probably be the most helpful to you if you could find a lab where the PI or senior investigators are willing to take you on and to have post-docs/grad students teach you. Typically people will start out doing the grunt work just to get familiar with the type of work the lab does. But doing that for an extended period isn't the goal for undergraduates looking to be productive. You want to join a lab where you'll be trained and eventually move on to design your own projects even if you're initially working on one of a grad student/post-doc's projects.
