The research ladder

The single highest-return move a first-year student can make is to be in a research lab by the end of the first year. Not because the work will be glamorous (it will be dishwashing and data cleaning for a while) but because a lab is a free wet lab, a free fab lab, a free mentor, and the only path to Tier 3 of the bench, to the nanofab, to conferences, and to the letters that get you a job or a PhD. The ladder has four rungs and each one takes about a semester.

Rung one: getting in

Read first. The faculty pages, then one or two recent papers from each of five to eight labs. The paper-reading page makes this fifteen minutes each. You are looking for a lab whose problems you can imagine helping with and whose recent students were undergraduates.

Email with a specific observation. The template that gets replies:

Subject: Question about [specific paper], and an offer of time

Dear Professor [Name],

I am a first-year biomedical engineering student. I read your [year] paper on
[topic] and had a question about [something specific: a figure, a method, a
number]. [The question, in two sentences, showing you understood the paper.]

I have built [the specific thing: a single-channel EEG amplifier with a measured
noise floor of 12 µV RMS, and a Python pipeline for PhysioNet data]. I would
like to contribute ten hours a week to your lab this semester, starting with
whatever needs doing, and I have completed CITI training.

Could I have fifteen minutes to ask my question and hear what problems the lab
needs solved? I am free [three specific times].

[Name]
[Link to your build logs]

Specificity is the entire trick. “Can I join your lab” gets deleted. A real question about their paper gets answered by nearly everyone, because it is rare and flattering. The build log link is what turns an answer into an invitation.

Ask what they need solved. In the meeting, do not pitch a project. Ask what small problems are lying around: a jig, a data pipeline, a fixture, a literature search, a 3D-printed part. Offer to do one. Labs are full of unsolved small engineering problems and a student who solves one becomes a student they want around.

Send five. Expect two replies and one meeting. If none, revise the email and send five more. Ask a professor you have had a class with to introduce you; a forwarded email from a colleague is opened.

Rung two: from volunteer to paid

After a semester of reliable, documented work, ask about UROP (the university’s undergraduate research program pays a stipend for a semester with a faculty mentor; the application is short and the lab writes half of it). The lab gets a paid student, you get a line that says “research assistant.” Apply the semester after you join.

Reliability is the currency. Show up when you said. Write down what you did. Send a short weekly summary to your supervisor without being asked. Finish things. A student who does these four is in the top tenth of undergraduates in any lab.

Rung three: your name on a poster

By the second year, a defined piece of the lab’s work is yours. Push for something that ends in a figure: a characterizationCharacterization Measuring what your instrument actually does, such as its noise floor, bandwidth, and rejection, instead of assuming the datasheet. Related: Noise floorNoise floor What your instrument records when the input is shorted or connected to a perfectly quiet source; everything smaller than this is invisible to you. , PhantomPhantom A physical stand-in for tissue, such as saline gelatin with embedded wires, used to test an instrument against known signals. , Common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR)Common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) How much better an amplifier responds to a difference between its inputs than to a signal shared by both, in decibels; 100 dB means 100,000 times. . Glossary entry, a pilot experiment, an analysis. Present it at the university’s undergraduate research symposium (they all have one), then at BMES or the BCIBrain-computer interface (BCI) A system that turns measured brain activity into control of something outside the body, from a cursor to a wheelchair to a speech synthesizer. Related: DecoderDecoder The algorithm that maps neural signals to intended actions, such as a classifier or a Kalman filter. , Closed loopClosed loop A system in which the output feeds back to influence the input, such as a user adjusting their brain activity while watching the cursor it controls. . Glossary entry Society meeting with the lab’s support. A poster with your name first is the exhibit for this rung, and the practice of standing next to it answering questions is the best interview preparation there is.

Rung four: co-author

Contribute a figure, a method, or a dataset to a paper the lab publishes. This is a third- or fourth-year outcome for most students and it changes what you can apply for. Ask, explicitly and early, what would earn authorship in this lab; norms vary and it is a fair question.

Summers

Summer is where the ladder speeds up. NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates sites pay a stipend and housing for ten weeks at universities across the country; search the NSF REU site for neural engineering. The NIH Summer Internship Program places students in NIH labs. Amgen Scholars funds biotech-related summers at host universities. All three have deadlines in January to March of the preceding year, listed on the calendar. Apply to several; acceptance rates are low and the applications reuse each other.

Sophomore summer is the one that decides junior summer. A research summer as a sophomore makes a company internship as a junior likely; nothing as a sophomore makes it hard.

Mentors

Beyond your lab’s PI, find one person in industry (through BioUtah or the alumni network) and ask for thirty minutes every couple of months. Almost nobody does this and almost everyone asked says yes. Ask them what they wish they had known; write it down; act on one thing before you next talk.