Undergraduate Research? Where Do I Even Start?

He's back. While I work to meet a few deadlines, Ben is filling in again and providing some more perspective on his experience as an undergraduate. Hopefully this is just a start, and he'll be providing more details in future posts as he navigates many "firsts" in his career as a fisheries biologist. Notably absent from his description is any mention of full his calendar became after he started working in the lab, and how much sass he receives from me daily. I'm giving him the true fisheries experience. 

Getting involved in research as an undergrad can certainly feel like a daunting task. When you first arrive at college, no matter what school or major, it is undoubtedly going to be a lot different than anything you have ever experienced before. In the midst of trying to make friends, adjusting to college classes, and trying your best to get involved, thinking about your future is something that often gets thrown on the backburner. Nonetheless, when the time comes to take on a new challenge, it can be difficult to know where to start. Luckily, I am here to share my struggles and triumphs in finding an undergrad research position so all of you can live vicariously through me.

When I first decided that I wanted to get involved in undergrad research, the first person I went to was my academic advisor. At a regular advising meeting one day we were just discussing my courses for the upcoming semester and I brought up the possibility of starting to get some volunteer hours in a biology lab. Her recommendation to me was to go online to faculty webpages and start looking for professors doing research that might interest me. I took her advice and began searching for what I hoped would be my future home. While this was pretty interesting at the beginning, freshman me had no clue about half the research I was reading about. And with riveting topics such as “atypical heterotrimeric G protein Y sub-unit and guard cell K channel regulation in morphological development” and ”chronic unpredictable stress causes long-term anxiety”, I think I was starting to develop some long-term anxiety of my own. Not to mention the nightmare that is trying to meet with faculty that have schedules that are equally or more busy than your own class schedule.

There is nothing more awkward than walking into the office of a professor you have never met before and trying to simultaneously impress them while also trying to pretend like you know more about a research topic than you actually do. After my fair share of uncomfortable meetings with professors that were studying nothing close to what I was interested in, I decided to talk to an instructor that was teaching a class that I was taking in my major about research opportunities. Meeting with her was a great way to become exposed to researchers that were doing work that was more relevant to what we were studying in class. While I was disappointed that she was not able to offer me a research position in a lab of her own, I left her office a bit more interested in continuing my search. I sent out another round of emails to some of the people that she suggested to me and eventually heard back from two of them. This time when I met with the each of the professors I did my best to be straightforward about what my skills were and what I was hoping to get out of my experience.
              
Within the next few weeks I had heard back from both of them with two very different offers. The first of which was the potential for a full-time position, 40 hours a week, for the entire summer sampling in local state parks. The second offer was to work part time in the summer on a brook trout project. I think by now it is obvious which choice I made, but there were a few other considerations that I had to make when choosing a position. I knew that there was no way that I would be able to afford to spend the summer at school without another part time job. I did what I thought at the time was “biting the bullet” and declined what seemed like it would be a really amazing opportunity and opted for the part time position so that I could work part time at the university advising center in order to save a little bit of money. I could not have been happier about my choice.

​Finding an opportunity to work in research as an undergrad forced me to make a lot of difficult decisions and really reflect more seriously about what I wanted to do in the future. It is extremely difficult to make choices for reasons based on things other than simply academics, but as is the nature of life that we often have to choose between what we think is best for us and what is actually feasible. In this case, everything ended up working out quite well for me. After I took some time to get oriented to the undergrad research life, I was able to find a fair amount of success with the help of my mentor and other lab-mates. Through undergrad research I got to experience my first taste of field research. It was really engaging to see that skills that are so often talked about in the classroom coalesce into a real-world application used by scientists every day. As you heard in my last post, my research experiences have been invaluable when it comes to networking and developing effective science communication skills. I am also so grateful for all of the opportunities that have been made available to individuals like me through funding offered by a number of locations on campus that support undergraduates in research. It is thanks to these generous contributions that I am able to continue to perform research and better define my interests as I learn more and more about the world of fisheries science. I hope that one day in the future I can reflect again on my undergraduate research experience and how it has shaped me into the person that I am, but for now I will just sit back and hope for the best.