Princeton undergraduate students usually gain most of their research experience from things like independent work, theses, research-based courses, or summer research. However, you might not know that there are more options to do research during the school year: working a part-time job! Some of the most common part-time campus jobs you may think of might be working in a dining hall or at library reception, but you can actually do academic research and get paid for it. This isn’t limited to just STEM majors either; part-time research jobs exist across the humanities and social sciences and are offered by a wide range of departments. You could earn money and get work experience while analyzing literature, writing code, processing data, or working hands-on in a lab!
Here’s a quick guide on how to search for these jobs:
To find listings, you can visit the “Find a Job” section on Princeton’s JobsX website. You can click on Advanced Search, select the “Undergraduate Jobs” type, then filter the categories to “Research” and select the time frames of Fall, Spring, or the overall academic year. Different jobs can have different time commitments if they are a semester or year long, so if you are flexible in terms of when you want to start or finish, there can be more options.
As of the writing of this article, there were dozens of jobs offered across SPIA, Psychology, Politics, Neuroscience, Physics, African American Studies, Music, Chemical & Biological Engineering, History, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and even departments offering minors such as Medieval Studies, Hellenistic Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Statistics & Machine Learning, and the Center for Human Values. Other departments also frequently offer undergraduate research job listings and add new ones towards the beginning and end of semesters, so check regularly if a department you want to work with doesn’t have any jobs currently listed. If you know someone who has worked a part-time job in a department, then I would encourage you to check, as they might add new listings.
The hours of these jobs can vary—this often depends if the job is working in-person or remote—but generally have minimums of 5 to 10 hours per week (and lower in some cases) and are usually quite flexible. The wages can also vary but all pay at least $16 an hour and can often fulfill a federal work-study requirement, though if you plan on doing this you should reach out to the faculty who listed it.
During my Fall 2022 semester, I worked a part-time research job in the Astrophysics department working on observational cosmology. It was almost entirely remote, and I wrote code to analyze galaxies on the Princeton computing clusters. The hours were incredibly flexible, and my boss was totally understanding that I had just finished my first year and didn’t have a ton of experience writing advanced Python algorithms and working with Astropy packages. After the semester ended, my boss even requested an additional extension of funding that let me continue to work and get paid through the spring semester so we could continue the project throughout the academic year. Even though I didn’t have much free time to work on the project and wished I could have contributed more, I still had a wonderful experience—my supervisor even wrote me a letter of recommendation to use when I was applying to summer programs!
As a first-generation/low-income student, I was already planning on working a part-time job to earn money to support myself. Getting a research job let me learn, hone my skills for my independent work, bolster my resume, and get paid simultaneously. I would strongly recommend any student interested in research to apply to these part-time jobs, be they in your primary field, an adjacent one, or something entirely new! Most of these jobs don’t require a ton of experience (you are still an undergraduate, after all) and will help you learn a ton about what a department is like to work in and interact with faculty beyond just taking courses.
If you have any questions about my specific on-campus research job or any general questions, feel free to reach out to my email (xanderjenkin@princeton.edu). I also encourage you to reach out to the staff who posted any job listings you might be interested in.
— Xander Jenkin ‘25, Natural Sciences Correspondent
