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.

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Talk the Talk: Initiating Professional Conversations

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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.

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The Thrill of the Last Minute

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Photo by Annie Woehling

I will candidly admit that I was, for a long time, one motivated by fast approaching deadlines. In other words, I was known to occasionally procrastinate. Okay, I used to have a chronic procrastination problem. During my time at Princeton, I’ve had to abandon my favorite work-deferment method, which I’ve historically called “the thrill of the last minute,” because, after one (or six) too many all-nighters early on in my college career, I’ve come to realize I am just getting too old for that type of adrenaline rush on a semi-regular basis. My realization may have also had something to do with the infamous Princeton workload consisting of term papers, Dean’s date essays, and independent research that Princeton typically presents to students. I guess it doesn’t so much matter why I finally decided to change my habits, just that I did get there eventually? Better late than never, I suppose.

My new approach to handling large writing assignments still involves using deadlines as motivation to produce pages. These deadlines, however, are no longer the ones given to me by my professors and advisers, but ones I set for myself upon receiving my syllabi. For example, if I know I have three Dean’s Date papers, I set different personal due dates for each in the weeks leading up to their actual deadline. Continue reading The Thrill of the Last Minute

All Roads Lead to Gandhara: Integrating Science and the Classics

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Around this time last fall, I was spending consistent hours in the basement of Fine Hall, gathering data from the Map Library and struggling with ArcGIS and Matlab to make sense of it. My goal? To explain the success of Gandhara, a little-known ancient civilization in northwest Pakistan.

I first learned about the region during an independent research project in my last semester of high school Latin. Gandhara started as an outpost for Alexander the Great’s generals but grew into an incredible region of diffusion between Greek and Indian cultures. Greek and Buddhist influences merged freely in philosophy, religion, and art, and not much research existed on the area.

Gandhara slipped from my mind until I resumed school in my first semester at Princeton. I was enrolled in FRS 187: Earth’s Environments and Ancient Civilizations, a geoscience seminar that traveled to Cyprus over fall break. In Cyprus, we used geophysics to examine unexcavated areas near a Princeton archeological dig house. As part of the course, we were responsible for writing three scientific papers explaining why a civilization succeeded or failed using topographical, mineral, and climate-based evidence. My mind turned naturally to Gandhara. I wanted to create one comprehensive paper examining its success, but I wasn’t sure that I could find sufficient evidence from three different angles.

This is a map that I created to provide an overview of Alexander’s route into Gandhara and major cities along his way.

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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.

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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

Research lifeline: Phone a friend

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It’s the first thing you have to do before you really start that research paper: nail down the thesis.  After reading a few articles and narrowing down your focus, you’ve come up with a general idea for your argument, which is an important first step. However, until that idea is packaged in a strong and shiny statement, your paper has likely reached an impasse.

Of course, the thesis results from first asking a research question, trying to explain some phenomenon you’ve observed.  The goal is to answer the question innovatively and assertively, advancing something both original and powerful enough to change the debate on an issue.

But who said questions have to be rhetorical?

When I’ve settled on a topic but haven’t advanced past the thesis-planning stage, I like to ask my question out loud — so I give my sisters a call.  Both are graduate students, one in library and information science and the other in education, so their responses are a good way to test my ideas. I know I’m ready to seriously start writing if they both recognize the goal of my argument.

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Frist has phones, which means you can assess your argument on the way to late meal…

That doesn’t mean I want my sisters to always agree with me. In fact, the opposite can be much more useful (and is, admittedly, much more common).  A classic example: asking my oldest sister “Would you accept that Jersey Shore represents a modern version of the American frontier myth?” made her question more than just my thesis.  Continue reading Research lifeline: Phone a friend

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?

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