By Alana Wolfson, Peer Research Ambassador

First of all, you should be extremely proud of yourself, so celebrate! You got through the first hump of sending out cold emails, preparing elevator pitches, and even networking with professor(s)/UConn faculty. You already made the first big step of finding your passion and navigating undergraduate research. 

I know when I started my research endeavors at UConn, I was constantly asking myself: How do I prepare myself? How much do I have to know? What if I fail? Is this a stupid question? The list goes on…I eventually learned how to get over that intimidation factor and feel prepared. 

Talk to Your Research Team 

Communication with your research team is the best way to get over that intimidation factor. Whether it consists of talking to your PI/Professor, post-docs, grad students or even other fellow undergraduates, open communication is key. Any questions, concerns, or ideas you pick up along the way should be shared with your team. Your research group does not want you to feel intimidated! Asking questions and having open dialogue with your team will strengthen your relationships and even lead to new projects. From personal experience, asking questions or even bringing up ideas from a paper sparks the best conversations (nerd out all you want ). 

Additionally, open dialogue is essential in preventing problems. As an example, if you work in any setting with possible hazards, you need to have clear communication with your team. Clear communication is essential for your safety and prevents potential problems caused by miscommunication. No question is stupid, especially when it comes to your safety.  

Do Some Reading 

Almost every research project requires lots of reading! Reading your professor’s past work, or articles that relate to your lab/group are extremely helpful. That can consist of skimming through a bunch of abstracts/summaries (the first paragraph that appears in an article), or reading full papers is a great start towards getting prepared. This allows you to further understand the work that goes on in your team and create new ideas! I personally like to download PDFs of articles and take small annotations using an edit tool. This definitely comes in handy when you start writing!! 

Go Easy on Yourself 

You are here to learn and explore your passions. The whole purpose of college is to further your experiences, and education. If you are frustrated because a lab technique is difficult, you are unfamiliar with some jargon, or have a ton of writing/reading, take a DEEP BREATH. You are still adjusting and are working on yourself. This piece of advice can apply to honestly anything in college. Life is about improving and steady progress. Don’t feel as if you have to know everything when starting out! 

Take a deep breath, because you got this! Feel free to reach out to myself or any of the PRAs (Peer Research Ambassadors), if you would like to talk or learn more about the Office of Undergraduate Research.  

By Andrei Abarientos, Peer Research Ambassador

There’s a plethora of articles, classes, and Reddit posts dedicated to ensuring your success in a research career: how to find a professor, how to read papers, and how to make the most of your research experience. Those resources are, of course, incredible and important as you begin your journey into research. On the other hand, there’s a shortage of resources on how to mess up, how to make mistakes and how to handle them. In my opinion, knowing how to deal with your own human fumbles can be an even more important skill to be an effective scientist or researcher. Properly reacting to mistakes is key for building endurance in research, where blunders are commonplace in the field.

With that in mind, I think of myself as a bit of an expert on mistake-making. To be clear, I consider myself fairly adept in the lab, and I’m proud of the work I’ve accomplished. At the same time, over the course of my research career, I’ve mixed up samples, pipetted incorrect amounts, and lost track of what step I was on during a long experiment (most wet lab folks probably know the mental struggle of pipetting clear liquids into more clear liquids without getting confused). I’ve spent hours on assays like a western blot only to see it fail for one reason or another (see SDS-PAGE “Hall of Shame” for a sense of what I’m talking about).

I take solace knowing I’m not alone in this, having witnessed everyone from other undergrads to tenure-track professors make simple mistakes The title of this article’s a bit misleading. There’s no need to discuss how to make a mistake; if you haven’t made a mistake yet, you just have to spend some more time doing research. When you do the work for long enough, it’s bound to happen. It isn’t really science without some degree of failure, is it?

But especially when you’re just getting started, I know that those small mistakes can feel terrifying. You want to come off as the perfect undergraduate star, and you want to prove your worth, both to your research group and to yourself. It feels like any error threatens that perception. Here’s a few tips on how to make the most of your mistakes:

1. Breathe. Like I said before, everyone makes mistakes. No matter what career you enter, they’re bound to happen, and research especially is full of them. Don’t brush errors aside, but don’t take them incredibly personally either. Your suitability for research isn’t defined by minute moments, but instead by big picture progress. Little errors say little about your aptitude, but your reaction can.
2. Own up to them. I know, especially with an academic mindset where mistakes are often affiliated with penalties and grade deductions, your first instinct may be to try to cover up your own errors. I’ve heard stories of undergraduates trying their best to move forward with an experiment knowing they messed up, wasting their time and possibly their mentor’s time. Especially if you’re working closely with a mentor on a project, or using someone else’s samples, it’s crucial that you let them know immediately so you can move forward effectively. If you’re in a positive research environment, you shouldn’t expect any sort of long-term detriment to simple, one-off mistakes. As always, communication is key.
3. Think about ways to prevent them in the future. Sometimes, things just happen: a distracting noise, a pipette going awry. Most of the time, though, there’s some sort of way you can mediate potential issues in the future. Sometimes, you just need to be more mindful of the work you’re doing. Especially if it’s a protocol you’ve done many times before, it can be easy to go on autopilot and make a simple foible. Simply forcing yourself to be present, and keeping past errors in mind, can be enough. Other times, you can consider making the work easier to remember for yourself, including integrating a checklist or putting away reagents as soon as you’re done working with them.

You are not defined by your mistakes but instead by your reaction to them, and how you carry yourself forward in the future. Mistakes are a part of the learning process. No matter what level of research you are on, you will inevitably mess up sometimes. The most memorable and important advice I’ve received since I began my research journey was three simple words: “Make new mistakes”.   View your mistakes as a chance to learn something new and better your own skills. If you keep your head up and stay on a path of learning, you should be able to avoid making the same mistake twice.

By Annette St. Jacques, Peer Research Ambassador

Research changed my life, and here’s why:

It was my first semester as a first-year student. I chose my major based on what I was interested in during high school, but I did not fully know what I wanted to do with my life after college. I still had so much time to think about how I wanted to implement the degree that I was working for, but I wanted to try something new in a field I was interested in.

I learned about research from a professor. At the time, I was unaware that all the professors have some sort of research going on outside of teaching. I started looking into the research labs within my major, and sent a lot of emails hoping for any type of response. At that time, I did not know how to get involved. It took a few months to find a lab that I felt I could fit into, but by the end of my second semester, I was able to secure a spot in a lab for the fall.

I spent my second year reading publications and getting trained on new techniques. Believe it or not, I spent the greater part of my third semester dissecting fruit fly ovaries. More importantly, I started to appreciate how research works. I decided that next summer, I wanted to stay in the lab, so I applied for a SURF award and received one! I spent that summer fully focused on my project, without having to worry about classes. That summer was eye-opening, and it made me ponder about what I wanted to do with my life.

In my third year as a student and my second year as a researcher, I gained confidence in the work that I was doing. I was able to get some interesting results in my research project, and I was able to present my data all across the country at symposiums and conferences. My spring break included a long weekend in New York City, presenting at Madison Square Garden, and a week in San Diego, attending a national conference. While these opportunities  were just some of the big ones, there were small things I have learned in my research journey.

Since I was little, I was fascinated by how things work. Research is hard work, but I have also found a passion for creativity. I have learned how to read about something, think about an idea, come up with a question, and see what happens when I experiment. At the end of my third year, my project mentor said that I could work in the lab again in the summer. I have gained independence is my abilities and helped me figure out what I want to do with my life.

For me, classes and course work does not come easy. Studying and memorizing just to be settling in the medians for exams was, and still is a struggle for me. Research has become an outlet for me. It is a place for me to learn into the depths of my mind and think of the unknown. Now that I am going into my last year as an undergraduate student, I have realized that research has helped me find out who I am and how I want to go forward. The critical thinking skills I have acquired have helped me in the lab, but also outside of the lab. Research has, and still is, teaching me new outlooks.

Looking back, I realize how naïve I was. I thought that my major was just a single road to a specific career. Getting involved in research opened up my mind. I have been able to take what I learned in my courses and implement it in a different way. I have also had the opportunity to explore different career paths. My research mentor has been able to connect me to many experts in my field and help me plan for my future in a different way than I ever imagined.

Now as I enter my last year as an undergraduate student, I have decided that I want to pursue a career as a researcher. An idea that I never thought about before coming to UConn, but one that I have found to be my true calling.

Annette is a senior majoring in Molecular and Cell Biology. To learn more about her, click here.