#they APPLIED. they have to be approved as the best facility by the noaa

[florida3exclamationpoints]

GOING TO CLEARWATER AQUARIUM!!SEEING MY BELOVED DOLPHINS!!!!!!

[eponymous-rose]

Hello! I know you're busy, and I hope this isn't too intrusive, but I wanted to ask about your experience with undergrad research! I'm a sophmoore physics student wanting to get into research, but not sure where to start. My professors say it can be as easy as asking, but everyone's research is so advanced I barely understand the abstract. I know we're not in the same field, but do you have any advice? What would you say if an undergrad asked if they could help you research?

Oh gosh, I had a lot of really good experiences with undergrad research! As a professor now, I’d try to make it happen for any student who expressed an interest---there’s always some money in our department to pay students for a summer research internship, and for something longer-term we have a 3-credit “Independent Research”-style setup.

For me, during my undergrad I took on two summer research positions and a sixteen-month full-time internship at a forecasting office that included some research during the winters. The internship was through a special program with the university, but the research summers were funded through a government agency (NSERC in Canada)---if by chance you’re in Canada, they’d be a phenomenal choice! In the U.S., science-wise there’s the REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates), which will fund your work on any project funded by the National Science Foundation, and if you can spin things toward oceanography or atmospheric science I know NOAA does the Hollings Scholarship, which funds research at a NOAA facility (decent pay plus room & board). NASA also has a TON of internships (I did mine as a master’s student, but they’re also open to undergrads).

But these are just sources of additional funding---often, professors and departments have money set aside to fund undergrad researchers, so you don’t have to worry about all this(and professors can tell you all about these and help you apply if they’re relevant to your field anyway). 

Basically, I went to professors whose stuff seemed interesting---like you, I definitely couldn’t parse most of what they were doing, but I had ideas like “hey, this person works on tornado stuff” or even more vaguely “I like this way this guy taught his class, I bet he does really cool research”. I just shot them an e-mail, said I was interested in doing research as an undergraduate, and asked if I could come chat with them about their research and the possibility of getting to work on it during the summer.

The first project was with a hail researcher after my second year of college, and he told me about NSERC---we put together an application, which was approved, and I spent the summer getting paid well to digitize this really old dataset that nobody had looked at, attend group meetings where this professor and his postdocs and grad students chatted about the results, and finally present some of my own results at the end. Really, really good starting point! I wound up working with the guy on an honors thesis at the end of my degree, and he wrote me a great reference letter for grad school.

After my long internship at the forecasting office, I was finishing up my final year of undergrad, and I had a real “fuck it, why not?” moment. I had this oceanography professor who was just very easy to understand, very cheerful, and had infectious energy. He was technically in the physics department, so not at all my area of study, but I figured I’d gotten an A in his class, so why not? I e-mailed him mentioning the NSERC research I’d done, told him what I’d enjoyed about his class, and asked if he had the funding for and time to supervise an undergrad research assistant over the summer, even though I wasn’t in his department and this wasn’t at all my specialty.

And he was delighted! He brought me on board (again with NSERC funding) for the summer between undergrad and grad school, and I learned all about experimental fluid dynamics: I helped build this complicated tank setup, ran laboratory equipment more valuable than a Ferrari that inexplicably still ran on Windows 95 in 2010, attended his really entertaining group meetings (I remember him working with a grad student to prep her for her Master’s defense: he put on different hats to impersonate each of her committee members and expertly predicted which questions each would ask), met a retired spy at a dinner party (??? this prof knew some cool people), and finally put together some figures for his postdoc’s paper that wound up getting published. As a result, my first-ever scientific publication is a second-author credit in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and ten years later I still get the occasional question about it, which is terrifying every time because hey, still not my area of expertise.

But that one gave me the amazing experience of understanding how much knowledge was transferable between disciplines: I didn’t have to be an expert on the subject matter to be helpful in a research lab. My NASA internship was working on an ecological satellite, for crying out loud. And a few weeks ago a senior colleague was telling me that the main reason they hired me was the versatility and flexibility they saw in my CV.

Undergrad research was HUGE for me, and I can guarantee that it’s something that elevates any grad school application! Even if the research feels simple or routine, having senior scientists who can write you letters of reference with more details than just “so-and-so got a grade of such-and-such in this class” is a MASSIVE advantage, wherever you decide to go after college.

All of this longwinded storytelling boils down to the advice: talk to the professors who inspire you, tell them they inspire you, and ask if you can help them do the things they love. Best of luck, and please let me know if you have more specific questions---I’ll be happy to answer!