Presentations are a large part of many research disciplines.
My inbox gets bombarded with emails advertising various events on campus on a daily basis. And every Monday, the Psychology Department advertises one particular event: Departmental Research Presentations. I always notice and read these emails, curious about what kinds of research professors and graduate students are conducting at the University. However, no matter how intriguing the presentation topic, I have never actually showed up to these presentations… that is, until recently. Continue reading Engaging in the Optional: The Benefits of Going the Extra Mile
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…
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
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
Office hours are great places to sit and get to know professors! Special thanks to Laura Sarubbi for this photo.
Talk to your professors.College students are frequently given this age-old advice, which seems to exist as a panacea for low grades, a need for recommendation letters, a desire for intelligent conversation, and the like. However, most students will be quick to inform you that talking to professors is easier said than done. Whether held back by fear of inadequacy, intimidation, or just pure laziness, many students shy away from interacting with their educators. Unfortunately, this fear prevents students from obtaining amazing opportunities, especially ones related to conducting research.
As a learning consultant at Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, I’ve discussed the difficulty of talking to professors with many of my peers. Most express a strong desire to engage their professors in conversation, but are unsure of what to say, or how to say it. While I’m no expert on perfecting the verbalization skills necessary to score a perfect relationship with professors, I have had some experiences where simply putting myself out there has made a world of difference for my Princeton career.
Independent work and research research are by and far collaborative efforts.
It used to be easy to tell myself that I could do everything alone. That was the way I had mostly done things until college, and I never felt the need to change. It was no different when I began research at Princeton. It was easy to convince myself to not to ask questions, to simply turn to books or articles for help, for fear of pestering and disappointing my adviser and my labmates. As long as I kept my head down and worked, I believed I would know what was happening eventually.
But I don’t tell myself that anymore. In fact, it frustrates me when I look back a year ago to that time. I’m only now filling in the gaps of my incomplete knowledge, a problem that would easily have been solved had I had the audacity to speak up and ask the questions that really mattered. I was just unsure and afraid about what I was expected to know – and somehow, I translated that into the fact that I was somehow expected to know everything. Because of that fear, I ended up neglecting my greatest resources, my greatest friends – my adviser, my labmates, my peers.
