Ready for Take-Off: A Pre-Departure Plan to Study Abroad

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The Office of International Programs helps students make their travel dreams a reality! (Photo credit: Morgan Celistan)
The Office of International Programs helps students make their travel dreams a reality!

Many people think about studying abroad while at Princeton, but only a select few actually apply. I seldom hear of research-oriented students studying abroad.  Many of us fear leaving behind the Princeton-centered academic research we’ve grown attached to. However, study abroad can be an amazing opportunity for student researchers to learn about their fields from an international perspective.

Next semester, I’ll be studying abroad at University College London (UCL). In addition to taking classes at my new university, I also hope to get involved in its research community. It seems easy to get caught up in the grandeur of being in a new location, focusing on exploring the area and forgetting to engage in meaningful and intellectual pursuits related to research. Therefore, I have spent the last few days trying to brainstorm ways to tie my research ambitions in with my plans for studying abroad. I’ve come up with a few pre-departure tasks that I feel will help me keep my research at the forefront of my mind while I traverse across the seas:

Continue reading Ready for Take-Off: A Pre-Departure Plan to Study Abroad

Applications: Get (and Stay) Excited!

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The excitement of post-graduate opportunities!

Last week, Stacey gave some great advice about productive things to do when you’re forced to pause for some part of your project, such as waiting on shipments or lab analyses. But what about the other end of the spectrum? What if you have so much to do that you feel overwhelmed and lose motivation to do any of it? Or if you’ve been working on your project for so long that you begin to lose interest?

I found myself in a similar situation a short while ago. I’m currently applying to various grad schools, and a major component of these applications is the  “Statement of Interest” or “Personal Statement”, in which you basically say why you’re interested in that particular program and how your past experiences have prepared you for it. And at first, it’s exciting! You’re reading about the schools/programs/research you’re potentially going to be spending the next few years immersed in, and the whole situation is one of promise and novelty. So you’re motivated to write, and you work hard on your statements.

But then, as you start working through the second statement, then the third, then the fourth, fifth, sixth… and the school work and extracurriculars start piling on, the initial feeling of promise and novelty wears off, and the task becomes a chore, even though you know it shouldn’t be.

So how do you put your mind back on track? How do you regain the motivation you had at first? Continue reading Applications: Get (and Stay) Excited!

Undeclared, Undecided–Still Eligible for Departmental Funding!

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By late March of my freshman year, I was wholly undecided about my major. I had taken classes in a wide range of departments including geoscience, math, comparative literature, and philosophy. I had not taken a single Classics course. But I still decided–and succeeded–in applying for funding from the Classics department and gaining exposure to a new ancient language last summer.

Sanskrit

Before I applied for Classics funding, I felt unprepared about my summer plans. I had taken two “mandatory” class trips during my fall and spring break, to Cyprus and Greece respectively, so I was used to the thrill of university-sponsored travel. I had assumed that I would spend my summer abroad and counted on attending a global seminar. After being rejected from my choice global seminar, however, I dreaded speaking to people about my nonexistent plans. I doubted that I had time to find and apply to international summer programs. I reset my sights around my home near New York City and thought about what I really wanted to learn. Continue reading Undeclared, Undecided–Still Eligible for Departmental Funding!

Tales of Adventures: Keeping Detailed Records of Your Work

Posted on by Stacey Huang

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

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

No Lab Coat Required

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Before last summer, I considered the term “research assistant” exclusively reserved for science majors in lab coats. And since my intended major and wardrobe don’t fit this conception, I never thought I’d apply the term to myself.

Well, I was wrong — in more ways than one. “Research assistant” has since been added to my resume, and I didn’t have to wear a lab coat to do it. In fact, pajamas were perfectly acceptable attire.

If you're looking for research assistant loungewear, school spirit is a plus. (photo by Melissa Parnagian)
If you’re looking for research assistant loungewear, school spirit is a plus.

Let me explain: After a wonderful semester in Dr. Renita Miller’s writing seminar Race, Gender, and Representation, I knew I was interested in identity politics. The class fundamentally changed how I looked at policies and judged their effectiveness for minority groups. Dr. Miller must have noticed my enthusiasm, because she described her research project – a look at representation’s effects on the Texas State Legislature – and asked if I wanted to help code data over the summer. Relevant information in the legislature’s bills could be accessed anywhere online.

Continue reading No Lab Coat Required

Research at Princeton: Independent But Not Alone

Posted on by Stacey Huang

Research is a group effort. Photo by Chung-Ho Huang
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.

Continue reading Research at Princeton: Independent But Not Alone

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

Back to the Basics: Transitioning from Student to Researcher

Posted on by Stacey Huang

Time to hit the books again! (Photo by Stacey Huang)
Time to hit the books again!

Four years after I had begun my first incursion into the research world, I saw myself as a somewhat seasoned student researcher. At the very least, I had some confidence in my research and experimental abilities. But it was not until this year that I realized that through all the lofty jargon and fancy terminology I had been picking up along the way, there was something I had been urgently lacking: the basics.

One of the eye-opening incidents happened just this past summer, when my supervisor asked me to explain to him an optical gas sensing technique known as “2f wavelength modulation spectroscopy.” That day, I had been trying to calibrate a laser that we were planning on using for a methane sensor and had been experiencing some problems. As my supervisor always does when he troubleshoots, he wanted to start from the basics. After all, if we didn’t know how every bit of the sensor worked, how could we figure out the possible sources of problems? But usually he had been the one doing all the explaining, so I was surprised when he suddenly asked me: “Stacey, what is the signal that we’re measuring anyway?” Continue reading Back to the Basics: Transitioning from Student to Researcher