Our lab has always been a nursery haven for undergraduate research. Recently, we determined that the 20+ graduate students and postdocs were actually outnumbered by the abundance of undergraduates milling around our lab.
I have had the opportunity to enslave mentor three undergraduates during my graduate career, and as the third student just graduated this past month I have been training two new students this summer to work on projects for me (more on this in a later post).
During the summer there is always an influx of new undergraduate research assistants that join our lab. These students work for free and without school credits anywhere from 10-30 hours a week. The university I attend is a very large, public school that puts a strong emphasis on its life science undergrads to get research experience. In discussions with my labmates I discovered that this is not always the case with smaller private and public universities (note: my undergraduate school was very similar in size and research emphasis to the Univ. of Illinois so I knew no other way).
Apparently most of my peers were paid from their first month of undergraduate research as they were a hot commodity and labs were happy to take any student that walked through the door willing to do some lab work. That is not the case here…
My PI, especially when teaching an undergrad course, gets many many undergrads looking to do research each week. Grad students in our lab interested in taking on a peon undergrad research asst. will have the students send emails, preferrably with resume or statement of intent included, and then choose from among the emails several students to interview in person. A recent round of was particularly disheartening as many of the emails looked more like text messages, lacking the punctuation, captialization and sentence completion you might expect in an email to a potential employer/advisor. Also, copying the descriptions verbatim from the lab website or using phrases along the lines of I want to work on cancer, because its bad and kills people will not garner an interview.
The face-to-face interviews are even more enlightening, though by this time most of the students are well prepared and relatively able to articulate their thoughts on the research.
I realize that the process we use in our lab to select undergrads is extremely thorough and also time-consuming. But when there is such a large pool to choose from it seems wise to be selective. The “weeding” process has worked very well for me as the undergraduates who have carried out research with my guidance have been incredible. Yet, labmates of mine have had less than stellar experiences using the same process after choosing what they thought was the most promising undergrad of the bunch.
So I wonder if our lengthy selection process is any better than just taking in the next student that walks through the door looking to do research? How do our “success” rates compare (i.e. how big of a waste of your time are they)?
And is it more about the training than what the person brings with them to the position?
So far I have had two undergrads that were merely assigned to me (no selection process). Currently there is a 50-50 good experience ratio (for me at least). Sounds like selection is helpful in improving your odds.
Yes, the selection does seem to have been worth the effort put in by you, but it’s a good point that on top of that the training’s crucial too.
We have an additional factor — we only take sophomores or younger. It takes so long to train undergrads that it works out better for everyone if the undergrad has a few successful years, instead of maybe the last few weeks of one summer.