Peng Liu
Rebecca B. Weldon & Valerie F. Reyna
Human Neuroscience Institute, Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850.
Working as a team is always better than yourself. Recently, I mentioned this though to some excellent Ph.D. students, and the main goal was to expect to work with them and have more work and larger impact produced to our academic society. Unfuntunetly, as we all know, all Ph.D. researchers are too busy with their own tasks to be able to provide more effort to any more additional work. In addition, there are some research funds concerns that may also restrict our cooperation. In this article, the authors proposed the importance of cooperative research and how to successfully incorporate undergraduate researchers into a complex research program at a large institution. I believe this article is going to help a lot for all Ph.D. student and any researcher who wanna have more and larger impact works done effectively.
Initial screening of potential undergraduate research assistants: Making sure it is a good fit
The first point is to make sure the potential undergraduate research assistant is a good fit for your team. The very first step in recruiting is to find the students who are really interested in being a part of scientific research, and then, we should send an initial screening survey to any interested students, which is usually including basic questions about the student and also some questions about career ambitions and extracurricular activities. We need to know why the student thinks he or she will be a good fit for one (or more) of our research teams. To get a better sense for whether this student is a good match for the lab, the next step is to let our graduate students have a talk with the undergraduate student. Lastly, we recommend the student to the directory of our lab for a final interview.