My experience with undergraduate research
The prospect of research is quite mystifying to many undergraduates. What does exploring or discovering something novel actually entail? How can I get started without any experience? What will my work contribute regarding the project scope, timeline, and publication? I’m by no means well-versed enough to give a comprehensive evaluation, but I can provide my perspective on the research group I have been involved in for a year.
For context, this group focuses on the application of mathematics on developing software useful for modeling molecules using graphs and rigidity theory. I was lucky enough to simply ask a professor to get involved, and numerous anecdotes share similar starts, as students likely wouldn’t know what specific field or project they would like to join. It’s similar to one’s occupation; how should I know whether I like this field until I’ve gained some real experience with it? But I digress.
Research has an incredibly high barrier to entry when working on novel ideas or implementations of some degree, especially with the hard sciences. I think it’s generally understood that many undergraduate positions, such as lab assistants, exist to complete routine tasks rather than contributing to the forefront. I’m glad that I’m on the algorithm team rather than the theoretical team, as it is much easier to generate an efficient procedure based on the understanding of an individual task than understanding the scope of many more steps and generating new ideas for proofs (This is not implying that my tasks are routine - far from it, I hope).
In such positions, then, it’s no surprise that research is quite individual-focused. Collaboration certainly occurs among and between teams, but day-to-day progress is made by individual incremental breakthroughs. I spent my first few months just listening in on group meetings and trying to understand what was being discussed, clarifying some parts I didn’t understand, but not everything, as I did not want to interrupt the meeting so often.
In my personal experience, this collaboration and expectation has also been somewhat unorganized, which adds to the already high barrier to entry. In classes and internships, you are typically given very specific constraints on what to do, and even if there’s a curveball the many people who have experienced something similar can help you out. But here, much of the prerequisite information is buried in obscure papers that aren’t commonly provided to new team members, and the highly relevant information discussed in meetings and allocated to tasks are not always well documented, making it easy to get lost. The metaphor I liken it to is trying to pass an obscure coding puzzle question with no test cases (Get it? It’s Leetcode and I’m a CS major. Haha…).
The truth is, most research is slow and suffers a lot of the other same problems as academia. Compared to masters/PhD students, ‘undergraduates are fickle’ (said by my lead, and I don’t disagree); for many, it is not a top priority, and just managing everyone’s schedules is challenging. Having a communicative lead and a passionate team can work wonders to everything I discussed above, but publishing papers takes painstakingly long, and creating real impact is difficult. I’m less inclined to pursue research since joining the group and learning more about the process, but I still enjoy the different environment and problems it invokes compared to classes or industry. Overall, I think everyone can try research, but research is not for everyone.
Anyway, I spent this whole time discussing research without actually defining it. Maybe a taste of the experience?