Tips & Tricks

One of the amazing things about participating in research full-time is the in-depth, experiential learning and focus you’ll enjoy in the lab. You’ll loose track of time, the day of the week, and occasionally even the month.

If your friends are spending the summer working through a Netflix bucket list, they might not understand your commitment to the lab, your research project, and your future. Some might continually remind you about their relaxing summer, and compare it to the work-intensive one you’re experiencing. Stay the course.

Spending more time in the lab during a summer experience brings opportunities to do more than move a project ahead faster or learn techniques too complicated for the regular term. More hours in the lab also means more in-depth conversations that go beyond the topics typically discussed with labmates and mentors during the semester.

Basically, this law states that, “it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” New and seasoned researchers alike find that this reflects the true realities of bench work (and writing, and coding, and library research and pretty much everything else that is research related).

There is nothing better than getting a punishingly difficult technique to work, or coming up with the next research question after interpreting a result.

An in-depth summer research experience will give you the luxury of time to think about strategies and perhaps test several. It might be so exciting that you’ll have difficulty sleeping some nights even when you’re soooo tired after working in the lab all day.

Being in the lab five days a week for several hours each day will certainly help you meet your research objectives faster than during the semester. However, at some point your project will likely hit a wall. You might need solve a technical error, be stuck trying to optimize a fickle procedure, or need to dig deeper into the scientific literature and reconsider your strategy.

Spending your summer doing research full-time? Expect to gain greater rewards than a regular semester experience.

More time in the lab means more opportunities to take a greater role in planning and conducting experiments, collecting data, and analyzing results.

You might have the option of working on an independent project as the “student PI” with all the responsibilities and rewards that accompany the title.

Additional hours in the lab will also lead to more opportunities to learn, contribute, and become an integral member of the research team.

If you’ve decided to make the most of your summer by participating in a full-time research experience, you’re about to embark on a new, challenging adventure, and it won’t include much time for lounging.



During the summer, you might be in the lab more hours in a single day than you spent in the lab in an entire week during the semester. Working, taking notes, and thinking about research for several hours (and days) in a row can be a difficult adjustment.

Last semester, I spoke with a graduate student who was almost done writing his thesis and then--you guessed it--his computer crapped out on him! 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have a backup. His reasoning? "I’ve never backed up, not even as an undergrad and I never had a problem before.”

Above all, avoid the wishful thinking that because you’ve never had a virus, been a victim of ransomware attack, never driven your car over your computer, or had an untrained puppy pee on it that it could never happen to you.

If you're taking a break from your research experience, or won't be returning when the next semester begins, there are some specific tasks you'll need to do before saying goodbye to your labmates.

One task that is easy to overlook, but is so important, is reminding your mentor about any living stocks you worked with during the semester.

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