Stop and Smell the…Citations? Keeping Sharp Even in Stagnation

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Tired?
We all get into a lull sometimes.

Starting out on the path to research is always exciting. Poring over annals of literature and getting a taste of a mere fraction of the boundless knowledge the Internet and the library have to offer is very satisfying, and sometimes it feels like the stream of productivity and knowledge will last forever.

But what happens when you come to a roadblock? As the semester progresses, things can start to get slow, even feel like they’re coming to a standstill – that one piece of evidence you need to cite your argument just remains elusive, you end up waiting a week for a shipment for equipment you need to run some new experiments (as I currently am). Sometimes, you simply start getting tired of spending endless hours reading, writing, thinking, and then reading and writing again about the same topic. It can be difficult to maintain motivation in the face of those slow-moving moments. Continue reading Stop and Smell the…Citations? Keeping Sharp Even in Stagnation

Keeping Up is Hard to Do…

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Keep working through the months! (Photo by Yuem Park)
Keep working through the months!

What did I never expect to be challenging about the senior thesis? Its relative lack of deadlines.

As Princeton students, we’re busy. On top of the vast quantities of course work that we have, many of us take on multiple extracurricular activities such as sports or dance, and each week becomes a battle to meet deadlines for problem sets or readings. And through the trials and tribulations of our first few semesters here, we get better each day at balancing our commitments and meeting deadlines until they become normal parts of our lives.

But your senior thesis will throw you a curve-ball. By this point we’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to work around deadlines that, at first, it can be a little confusing as to how to react to the unexpected freedom of independent work. It’s very tempting to throw down your pen triumphantly when you see that your first deadline is at the end of the semester, and forget about your thesis until one week before that date. But of course, it’s not that easy – after all, a senior thesis is expected to exhibit the cumulative work of an entire year (which cannot be achieved one week before the deadline!).  Continue reading Keeping Up is Hard to Do…

Tales of Adventures: Keeping Detailed Records of Your Work

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Notes can get messy very quickly. Photo by Stacey Huang)
Notes can get messy very quickly.

Whether you work in the sciences or humanities, it’s integral to keep track of your work. It sounds obvious – it did to me too – until I started flipping through some of my notes in my lab notebook, trying to figure out the tests and results for a few small tests last semester. I knew I had done the tests, but I just couldn’t figure out what exactly I had done. Eventually, I found a few numbers in my notebook but couldn’t decipher them. Maybe those notes made sense to me 5 months ago, but now they only look like random scrawls of numbers to me.

It isn’t always a lab notebook: it could be keeping track of papers you’ve read and researched, writing down ideas you’ve tossed around with classmates or your adviser, basically keeping a record of all the work you’ve done. Often it can get boring to record every little thing, and often it can feel unnecessary, but not keeping a detailed record or at least well-organized notes or data of your progress somewhere helps no one. It does your hard work no justice when you can’t look back on it in the future and save time by skipping what you’ve already done. It all saves you time in the future from looking at the same papers, doing the same tests. Continue reading Tales of Adventures: Keeping Detailed Records of Your Work

Reversing to the Start

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For me personally, the hardest part of writing any paper is writing the first few paragraphs. I get caught up in trying to find a starting place—do I start with an anecdote that somehow displays the significance of my research topic? Do I jump right in to findings of the research, and work my way backwards to how I got there in the rest of the paper? Do I give general background information, and move forward from there? There are a million and one ways to begin a writing piece, which is why, for many, choosing one that is appropriate for any given topic can be difficult.

Finding the right way to start can be especially difficult for independent work. I sat in front of my Junior Paper staring at a blank document, with only a title page and the honor code written out for days before writing a single word. Continue reading Reversing to the Start

Funding Proposals – A Salesperson’s Approach

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2a
What I needed funding for last year – the electron microprobe at MIT.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” And indeed, funding and supporting research projects is a priority for Princeton as well as many other institutions. But just because our society values research, it doesn’t mean that it’s a walk in the park to get a project funded. In fact, in many cases, it’s actually very difficult to get a project funded, even if it’s a highly worthwhile one.

However, this doesn’t mean that your chances of getting funding are beyond your control – the better your funding proposal, the better your chances are of getting your project fully funded. Of course that’s beyond obvious, but how exactly do you write a well-executed funding proposal? Below are a few tips that I’ve picked up: Continue reading Funding Proposals – A Salesperson’s Approach

Ready for Action: A Junior’s Guide to Independent Work & Research

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Textbooks and prep books track a student's past, present, and future! (Photo by Jalisha Braxton)
Textbooks and prep books track a student’s past, present, and future!

This past summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about my upcoming year back in the Orange Bubble. The transition from sophomore year to junior year is always described as being a tough one, especially for individuals in fields like Psychology, where independent research is required. Soon after declaring our major, we’re bombarded with emails that not only welcome us into the department, but also welcome into our lives an assortment of questions concerning what we want to do with the next (and last) two years of our undergraduate education.

How are you supposed to make decisions concerning independent work without much research experience on campus? What professors are best for your research interests? What exactly are your research interests? After many late nights reading countless websites and emailing tons of professors, here’s what I found about navigating junior year at Princeton. Continue reading Ready for Action: A Junior’s Guide to Independent Work & Research

The I-R-What?

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IMG_5144Ah, the Institutional Review Board. Set up to protect the rights of human subjects in research projects, it has an extremely integral role in upholding the standards of research ethics and morality. I’ll be the first to admit that the IRB application is nit-picky, especially for the low-risk research that most students will do. However, I then read about human experiments of years prior to the IRB’s establishment—like Tuskegee—and realize how truly important the IRB is and feel less like wanting to pull my hair out. If you don’t know what Tuskegee is, I suggest Googling it and you will have a new-found appreciation for the Institutional Review Board. You’ll finally understand exactly why the application is a gazillion pages long when all you’re really trying to do is send out an anonymous survey to a group of 35 kids. BUT, I digress.

If your independent research involves humans as experimental subjects in any way, including interviews and surveys, you will have to fill out an application to get IRB approval. The purpose of the review board serves to make sure that all of your methods are ethical and do not pose harm to the people with whom you are working. It seems long and arduous, but I promise you’ll survive. Continue reading The I-R-What?