Question Bout How The Research Process Works

[ballislife123321]

So if I get a chance to do a funded summer project, how does the entire process work?

Can someone give me a quick summary?

Also, at what point in the process are individuals able to do poster presentations, and become published?

 

Thanks .

[Bede]

Many new students (as I did) underestimate what is required to publish a paper. If you are in the lab, if you are really fortunate, have a senior student/post doc leading you by the hand, and learn very quickly, you will get enough enough data for a paper. However, there is still analysis and writing to do which you will be responsible for if you want to publish. In my lab, I have only seen one summer student move quick enough to get sufficient data, but I trained him and made sure everything was working. Unfortunately, despite his initial efforts and intellect, he didn't want to finish analyzing data on his personal time after his NSERC term was over.

 

When I was a master's student, I published 2 papers after I defended my thesis. It took that long to get published. Usually it takes a year to learn enough to get meaningful data, then a few months to get the data, and another year to convince your PI that your data is good enough to write up and will get citations and therefore the PI should look at it ASAP. I'm not joking- PI's look/submit papers according to how good they think it is. If you have  mediocre paper, it will languish for a long time as the post docs in your lab write better papers which get submitted before yours. 

 

Some labs work with very expensive reagents and there is a possibility the PI will only let you work with old reagents until you learn exactly how to do the protocols. In this case you won't get any meaningful data.

[zzz_etrigan]

I honestly think experiences will vary drastically because of the nature of your research, the type of work done in the lab, your PI, who you work under, and which stage of research your project is at. Not all PI are the same and their mood and trust of undergrads will vary. I was lucky enough to do two poster presentation, go to conference and publish as first author but from start to finish the process was around two years. I started a project than was sort of an addenum to a masters student work who has left the lab, and I was under a postdoc. I was trained decently but showed huge initiative and worked independently while generating meaningful results that summer. I continued voluntarily throughout.the school.year working on that project. Eventually my postdoc found a professorship position elsewhere and I was the only one left in the lab who could.finish that work so my pi really trusted me to go at it alone and generate data cause he wanted this smaller.project published as well as the other stuff.to show the money from the grant was not being wasted. During my second summer I was paid and generated like 90 percent of my.data and wrote it up and gave it to my PI. After all the edit we were quickly.published since only minor revisions were required.

 

Now, I consider myself.extremely lucky. Everything fell in place for me to publish if I just worked hard. It could've been that my pi didn't care about me and said scrap.the project. It could've been that the paper got stuck requiring major revisions and publishing would take years. So just be aware of how things have to line up for publishing opportunities to happen as first author. Its rare, happens, but you are more likely to get published as second or third author