Lactic Folly Posted November 9, 2011 Report Share Posted November 9, 2011 Let me rephrase - I mean a project where you can play a bigger role and potentially accomplish more for the same outlay of time. This might mean something that can be done without specialized technical lab skills, where data is either already available or easily obtained, and that you can work on at your own pace here and there. For example, you could be working on a survey, or crunching numbers from a database, or doing a literature review. Check out your school's summer student research days and you should see people doing this type of research in addition to bench labwork, in which your contribution tends to be a much smaller piece of the big picture. I am a bit biased though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtomSmasher2 Posted November 22, 2011 Report Share Posted November 22, 2011 Reason number 2 for being a lab slave - reference letter: negative I agree with your post except for this. You can get a reference letter out of it if you discuss this beforehand. The prof gets 3 hours a week x 20 summer weeks x $10 an hour= $600 of free labour, and spends 10 minutes writing a letter. That's $3600 an hour for him. Not a bad deal. This is contingent on your prof not being a slimeball. Unfortunately, most are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
<abstract> Posted November 23, 2011 Report Share Posted November 23, 2011 I agree with your post except for this. You can get a reference letter out of it if you discuss this beforehand. The prof gets 3 hours a week x 20 summer weeks x $10 an hour= $600 of free labour, and spends 10 minutes writing a letter. That's $3600 an hour for him. Not a bad deal. This is contingent on your prof not being a slimeball. Unfortunately, most are. I did about 30 hours a week for 16 weeks all for one thousand dollars. So there was a lot of sacrifice for little money but it payed off big time. Now, after that one summer I have a paid research position in the same lab (17$/hour) for the entire school year, and a co-op position in the same lab where i will get about 8500 for the summer next year. I also have the chance to publish several articles in mid impact journals. So not all prof's are slimeballs that is for sure.. maybe just the bio profs because they know you just want to put the experience on your app. In chemical engineering it is totally different. BTW.. what to you expect to get done if you are only doing 4 hours a week.. thats nothing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apache Posted November 23, 2011 Report Share Posted November 23, 2011 man, getting paid to do lab work may be worth it. everyone wins with an nserc and prof who knows how academia really works they're only paying you like 400 a month out of pocket (the other 1200 comes from the gov), so you work 20 hours a week, and spend 20 hours a week doing "library research" you're practically free labor in their bottom line... you get 1600 a month tax free, min... plus you don't have to work full time. they write you a nice reference letter, get to say u got an nserc, you write a letter of support for their teaching award, they sign you up for a bull**** research class in the fall semester where u do like nothing and get an a... but you have to find the sleezy prof that was just too lazy for wall street, lol! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apache Posted November 23, 2011 Report Share Posted November 23, 2011 basically research that isn't contingent on random lab **** ups, "arts" psychology research really caters to this, you run an entire study mostly by yourself in 4 months if you already know how to use spss (and understand stats) and have taken advanced research methods. I'd encourage people to look beyond bench research if they are at all interested in other areas. With more qualitative projects, an undergraduate student can take the lead on a project and write it up for presentation within a summer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scottzh Posted November 28, 2011 Report Share Posted November 28, 2011 Which lab are you volunteering for? in bio dept? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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