For those planning to spend their summer researching whether it’s your first foray or your senior thesis, there are a few things that I have taken into consideration this year with my own planning that I think will be useful for others.
It may seem like the hard part is over once you secure funding or the internship. It’s easy to go into autopilot mode and just let the summer unfold and happen to you instead of you to it. Summer is deceitful, however, and you don’t have as much time as you think you do. It’s important to start planning wisely for it so you can get the most out of your research experience and also have a wonderful summer.
To begin with, it’s important to develop a routine for the summer. Once school lets out, we no longer have the rigid structures of classes and labs, and even friends and their own plans. Internships often disperse people throughout the world, so that they often have to meet new people or sometimes spend their summers in a quieter area than the usual hustle and bustle of a college campus. Even Princeton’s campus during the summer time is a different, quieter beast than during the academic year. Having a strict routine can help mitigate the clumsy adjustment into summer, so you are not wasting days away.
Now, you may think, productivity is not such a big deal during the summer, right? Why should we bother with a routine when it’s not as busy? While the argument can be made that research is very busy, I also want to take it a step further to say that routine is necessary to achieve peace and try new things that can make your summer that much more enjoyable. It’s easy to get caught up in the lab with tubes or readings if you have no structure for your day and you may find your summer lackluster. Compared to the school year, this is the fun version of planning that can make your inner organized self come out. My biggest tip for having a great routine: plan your days modestly. Don’t have huge goals you wish to achieve. Five goals written out is more than enough, and sometimes even too much. You can have one goal per month, and that’s more than enough routine. Summer is not endless, and you have to recognize that to be able to plan something realistic for the imminent idleness that will undoubtedly fill your summer days (which is okay!). Once you get into summer properly, you may realize you can fill your days more and more, but you have to start somewhere, and it is important to start small first. For me, I decided to take on more cooking this summer and baking, so I made sure to find a place with a kitchen when choosing housing for the summer. It may seem like a small thing, but it will bring a lot of light to your days.
Second tip for your summer research internship: set deadlines for your research. Once again, with research, you could fall into the trap of thinking that you have all the time in the world for your senior thesis or your project. The last day of summer feels so far under the bright sun. However, you can easily get caught up at a small hurdle in your research that delays you for weeks. Do not doubt yourself, do not dig yourselves into holes. If something doesn’t work, just move on to the next step instead of making a thousand conjectures on what step you could have done wrong. Don’t get me wrong, troubleshooting is crucial, but if you have repeated it multiple times and you are still encountering a wall, it might be time to move on. Science and research is researching the unknown. If you don’t know why something is not working, you have to remind yourself that the things you are researching are unknown–for a reason. Keep your feet light as you move from step to step. I fall victim to this trap quite often, and I’m fortunate to have my mentor pull me out of a hole of conjecturing and repeating an experiment a million times. Simply talking out the experiment with your mentor and speaking your mind can allow the mentor to step in and prevent you from spiraling. They have more experience with these kinds of ‘dead ends’ in research and feel more comfortable to step away from something even if to you it may feel unfinished.
Our summer should be something we seize and step into rather than something that just happens to us. Having that mindset can help structure summer most effectively, where you are doing more than just research but truly resting and resetting your mind after a hectic academic year. It will prepare you for the upcoming academic year too if you are fully rested; but let’s not jump ahead into the upcoming year just yet and just plan to savor our summers first (and also finish this semester!).
— Haya Elamir, Natural Sciences Correspondent
