Tips for choosing an undergraduate research project

The start of any new semester is accompanied by undergrads enrolled in degrees with a research component scrambling to find professors willing to supervise mini-projects. The (lack of) success in a project often boils down to factors outside the student’s control, such as a crucial piece of equipment breaking and being unusable for months. Nevertheless, there are some strategies you can use improve the chances that your hard work will lead to a coveted journal article:

Ask early

Potential supervisors might need time to brainstorm possible undergrad-friendly project ideas. Or if they’re popular and receive many requests, they might only offer a spot to the first person who asks. Maybe after meeting the supervisor and hearing further details on the project you decide it’s not a good fit and need to find someone else. The earlier you start looking, the more possibilities you will have.

Find someone new

Contacting a professor you have never met can be intimidating, so it’s tempting to ask lecturers of current or previous courses to supervise a project. This is also a common strategy for students who didn’t think about organising a project until the first week of the semester. Sadly, this is sub-optimal for a few reasons:

• Professors with teaching duties usually have less time for supervision.
• You are probably following in the footsteps of many undergraduates before you who worked on the same topic and already plucked the low-hanging fruit.
• One of the biggest benefits of undergrad projects is expanding your network and trying something new without much risk – even if your project does not achieve the original goals, if you put in regular effort you will rarely get a poor grade. By sticking with familiar topics and supervisors, you’re less likely to stumble upon something you didn’t know you excelled at.

Check the supervisor’s history

If the professor leads a group, ask the existing team members and alumni about their experience. Is it a supportive research environment? Does the professor respect the team members? How regularly does the team publish? Is the professor responsive and taking an active role in day-to-day problems, or are students left to fend for themselves? These questions are best asked in-person, not over email, and are equally valid for prospective PhD students and postdocs. For undergraduate projects it is also useful to ask the team members about their future career plans, whether they think the research field is fertile or in decline, and what transferable skills they have picked up.

Project scope

You need to identify a niche where your unique experiences will be useful to the project. Typically for undergraduate projects, you will lack high-level background knowledge (covered in later year courses), so it is better to focus on skills you either have or are keen on learning. It is rare to find a project where programming skills will not be useful, even if just for validating an analytical result or processing experimental data obtained by someone else. Projects aimed at supporting an ongoing study in this manner are more likely to lead to a publication, although not as the lead author. Your best bet for a first author publication is some new but speculative idea that the professor feels is too speculative to risk on a graduate student or postdoc.

For example, my first project entitled “New constraints on the Earth’s inner core anisotropy from Antarctic seismic stations” exceeded my wildest expectations and (eventually) resulted in my first journal publication. In hindsight I think this project was risky – it involved using a unique but quite noisy seismic dataset to study the Earth’s inner core. I did not need to program everything from scratch – the “meat” of the project involved writing a shell script to analyze data using existing seismic analysis programs. Most importantly, I was lucky to have a highly responsive and patient supervisor who put up with all my naive questions and was willing to put in the substantial extra effort to help me improve the project writeup into a journal-quality manuscript.