Reply to Undergraduate research opportunities

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Undergraduate research opportunities—Are these paid positions?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]It really just depends. I would not assume 11-15/hour at all. Students only get paid if the researcher has funds and genuinely needs the service they can provide. As a rule, undergrads aren't good for much for a summer except maybe data entry and some grunt level lab work. It takes too much time to train them to do the kind of things graduate students and post docs can do, and students at those levels work year round.

Of course, there are exceptions, but I would encourage undergrads to be clear about whether they are applying for paid positions or volunteer ones. Many times undergrads will volunteer to work in a lab (for free), and then the understanding is that, in exchange for being helpful (though not necessarily for 40 hours a week), they get access to learning about the research, how the lab works, being mentored by grad students and post docs, and a letter of rec from the researcher when they apply for grad school.

Obviously, this is not a great deal for a student who doesn't know what they want to study and who genuinely needs to spend the summer making money for the next school year, but it can be really helpful for students looking to go into competitive graduate fields. Clinical psych, for example. When I was a grad student we had volunteers who would do data entry and then, if they were reasonably smart, we'd work with them to help them contribute to a poster or paper that was going to be presented at a national conference. And the PI would write them a recommendation letter and/or consider them for our lab if they were a good fit.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics