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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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 Rocky Road: Not Always a Flat Trail

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A picture tells a thousand words, but even then it is often not the whole story. Geologic field research is frequently idealized in many people’s minds by the scenic landscape photographs that we take – open forests in beautiful river valleys, lush meadows along the tops of ridges, picturesque deserts, unbelievable views at the peaks of mountains… and, at its best, field research is indeed conducted in places like these. Last summer, for example, I spent 6 weeks gathering data for my senior thesis in the North Cascades, WA:

Looking at rocks (Photo by Sean Muleady)
Looking at rocks…

But amazing landscapes, although of course some of the best parts of our research, are only a small and arguably inconsequential part of the big picture.

Almost the entirety of the research that goes on in geology fails to be captured in the idealized photographs that most people see. To just touch upon some of the work that goes on behind the scenes, researchers have to prepare funding proposals, read the literature that relates to the problem at hand, manage a budget, analyze samples in a lab, and collaborate with other researchers. Although each of these components of research are critically important, today I want to explore one particular challenge that I grappled with over my field season this past summer. Continue reading The Rocky Road: Not Always a Flat Trail

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?