👩‍🔬Get More Involved

We are always excited when undergraduate RAs express wanting to get more involved in the research. This will require a greater commitment on your part. You should not expect to get publications right away (if at all) but you will certainly gain skills and experience of what it is like to do research in psychology.

Chat with Us

You can usually start the process of getting more involved in the research by talking with a graduate student and expressing your interest to get more involved in the actual research. Ask them about specific projects they are currently working on. We will likely start with assigning you articles to read so that you can get familiar with the literature.

Read, Read, Read

I know you hate to hear this, but to discuss ideas and make significant contributions to a project you need to have a foundation of knowledge about our work and the related literature. Unfortunately, this means reading articles. A good idea would be to setup an undergraduate lab meeting (see below) or a lab journal club where you can all read and discuss articles together.

Learn R

We primarily use the programming language R to manage and process our data. If you become familiar with how to use R, this would be a great way for you to get more involved in the research. You can learn from many of the resources that are available online in addition to our lab's useRguide that covers workflows and packages more specific to our lab.

Lab Meetings

We will typically have lab meetings on Tuesdays at 10:30 am. Usually, this occurs in room 217 or on Zoom. Undergraduate researchers have a standing invitation to attend lab meeting so long as you are not scheduled to work or there is nothing else going on while you are on the clock.

We will try to record lab meetings, particularly when we are presenting results from ongoing projects in the lab or if we have a guest speaker. Watching these recorded meetings will help for you to get more involved in the research process.

Undergraduate Lab Meetings

If there is enough demand for it, a graduate student would be happy to supervise a group for an undergraduate lab meeting. This would involve a paper presentation from an RA and then discussion from the group, or talking about an issue in psychology, etc. The graduate student will not put more effort into organizing and running this than the RAs do and is merely present as a facilitator and to offer opinion and expertise. If enough RAs would like to do an undergraduate lab meeting, let the lab manager or a graduate student know. (Seriously, we like talking about this stuff a lot).

Author on Publications

Our studies usually result in publications in top-tier peer-reviewed journals. Large scale studies typically lead to quite a few publications.

To be considered as a co-author, you need to go above and beyond normal RA responsibilities. This means coming to lab meetings, discussing ideas about the study, significantly assisting with data analysis, coming up with a meaningful contribution to a paper, etc. In other words, demonstrating that you are knowledgeable about what the study is about and participating in the initiation, design, data collection, analysis, and writing up the report of a study. Assisting with data collection, data entry, and proofreading a manuscript is not sufficient for authorship, but will get you an acknowledgment.