October, 2023
The summer between my first and second year of college, I worked at Lehman Brothers. I lived at home in Queens and commuted into Manhattan. I was an intern on a project that redesigned their system for calculating interest as it accrued for foreign currency exchanges between banks. I had to wear a suit every day, which meant I had to buy a few new suits, which took up a large chunk of the money I was paid.
It was dreadfully boring.
The summers between my sophomore and junior years, and between my junior and senior years, I stayed at college. Both times I rented a hovel around my campus with a few other students I knew, and I worked for a professor doing research. And the money was basically the same (and I didn’t have to buy any new suits).
The summer before junior year, I won the equivalent of a UTRA (my college called it something different) with a computer science professor, doing research on natural language processing. That professor had been my first-year advisor, and I had worked with him designing my class schedule as a first year and a sophomore (and had taken two classes with him). So, I knew him (and he knew me) pretty well. The research didn’t amount to anything (and remains one of the weirdest things I’ve ever worked on), but it taught me a lot.
The summer before senior year, I worked for a professor in the psychology department. I had done an independent study with him the year before (he let me design an absolutely crazy experiment on learning, which had a crazy result). So, again, he knew me, and I knew him. But neither that independent study nor the summer research, which lead to my senior thesis, amounted to anything (although I still have the code for the computational models that I built).
I applied to graduate school during my senior year of college. I was rejected from 8 of the 10 programs that I applied to (including, by the way, the department at Brown in which I now teach). At Illinois, the person I would have worked with was an alumnus from my college. It’s a small college and there aren’t a lot of us, and we all have a bond. But I wound up going to UC Berkeley for graduate school. I never knew why the person who admitted me did so (I left his lab during orientation week, which is a story for another day). But I learned later that it had something to do with the fact that I had done this research in both psychology and computer science.
This is a post about summers. But I’m writing it in October. I’m writing it in October because today was the first day I received an email asking if I would take on an intern student from another university over next summer (in this case, I said no, but there are lots of other cases where I say yes). At small colleges, professors often seek out undergraduate students for research opportunities. At larger universities like Brown, students often have to ask professors for those opportunities.
So, you want to get some research experience. Here are a few thoughts.
1) It never hurts to email a professor directly and ask them if they have an opening in their lab. If you use the Department Directory or even better, the Directory of Researchers at Brown, which you can search by keyword. Go to that Directory. Type in “clinical psychology”. I got 344 entries. Three Hundred forty-four faculty who have that as a keyword! That’s a lot. Look through them and see if something interests you. Of course, this means that you have to email the person. Introduce yourself. Say why you’re interested in what their research is about. Ask if they are looking for students to work in their lab over the summer (or during the school year). Ask if they are participating in the UTRA program (or simply use the UTRA program as a way to find out about projects that are going to be funded by Brown). The worst thing that can happen is that they say no.
2) NSF (the National Science Foundation) runs a program called “Research Experiences for Undergraduate Sites) (REU-Sites). These are programs that the federal government funds through universities for students in the sciences. There is a list of them here. Note, however, that these programs usually only accommodate US Citizens and Permanent Residents. NSF also funds a lot of individual researchers to put on summer internship programs. These are a little more field specific, and there isn’t a centralized database for them. However, they are often announced over listservs. For example, the cognitive development society runs a listserv called cogdevsoc, which anyone can subscribe to, and that lists all of these announcements. But these are specific to developmental psychology. There are other, similar listservs, for other fields in psychology and cognitive science.
3) Maybe you want to live at home – and your home is not Providence. But maybe there is a university or college near there. Perhaps instead of looking at the list of researchers at Brown, you look at the list of researchers at that university or college (many of these have directories similar to Brown’s; for example, I typed in “Research at Yale” and “Research at Washington University, St Louis” and got similar pages. Try it. Again, you have to wind up emailing people. But again, what’s the worst that can happen?
Of course, a difference here is that most of these opportunities will not be paid. It’s often hard for a professor to pay a student at another university. Note, it’s not impossible, but its rarer.
4) Finally, this website has a good list of summer research programs, particularly geared for students interested in medicine, but also neuroscience and psychology. This also includes research at NIH directly.
These are just a few options. But the main point here is that a way of gaining research experience is to use your summers to build up research experience. It also doesn’t hurt to start in October or November, because a lot of the positions start to be posted then, and a lot of faculty start to think about their summer before Thanksgiving. It's hard to do this. It's hard to plan this far in the future (professors find it hard too!) But really, what I think a lot of people find hard is the act of writing an email asking for the opportunity. And I get it, that's difficult. But you miss every shot you don't take. And faculty don't get mad at being asked; we get mad when talented students don't ask.