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Here are some advices to undergraduate students who want to gain some experience in a research environment:
1. Don't be shy in sending emails to professors. In the "worst" case you will never get a reply or will be rejected.
1. Don't be shy in sending emails to professors. In the "worst" case you will never get a reply or will be rejected.
2. Don't send the same email to multiple professors at the same time. Don't waste peoples time unless you are really willing to work with them. Go one by one.
3. Don't be apologetic about your lack of expertise. Of course you don't have expertise! Rather, try to comment on your strengths and interests. This will help the professor to find a suitable project to your interests.
4. Persistency is the key! Allocate a reasonable amount of time to your research everyday. Of course you have other, perhaps more important duties but if you want to gain experience persistency is the only way.
5. Don't work with multiple professors at the same time. This is practically not possible leading to decreased experience gain as you will be spending less than the bare minimum with both.
6. Keep your expectations about the outcomes of your research reasonable. It is possible to first author a paper in an undergraduate research but this will come at a price!
7. Especially in experimental work, you might be deceived to think that learning how to use experimental setups is the task, rather learning the reason why you use a particular experimental setup and interpreting the results is the task. So first learn the basics. +
+Whenever you get introduced to an equipment or a technique, first learn how it works and why it is used for the given purpose.
8. Find as many papers as you can on your research topic. Classify them according to a certain criterion (anything will work). Then, start by reading the seminal papers, review papers and finally focused research papers. For beginners, the language of journal papers is hieroglyph
Study the seminal papers sentence by sentence. Understand the reasoning. Don't try to go into technical details of measurements unless this is why you read them. Rather focus on the results and how they are important.
9. Enjoy. If you can't find the joy in it, either change your expectations or your research group.
I hope this helps.
//Türkçesini daha sonra paylaşacağım.
I hope this helps.
//Türkçesini daha sonra paylaşacağım.
