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?