Undergraduate Research in the College of Engineering, and I'm within the Engineering Learning Initiatives Group. So what we're going to talk about today is how do you get started in research with a focus on how do you do that here at Cornell and a new tool we have to do that. So, the very first steps to getting started, don't really involve any tools or anything high tech. It's actually all about you and taking some time to reflect. The very first thing to ask yourself is, am I ready for research? The questions to ask yourself there, first of all, have you completed at least one semester at Cornell? In that, are you comfortable with your academic load and confident that you're ready to add an additional responsibility? If that's not you right now, that's okay. It's still great to start exploring research opportunities and get ready for maybe next semester or whenever it is that you're ready to get started. Other questions to ask yourself is like, do you have the time? Do you have somewhere 6-10 hours each week? For those of you thinking about STEM, that could be life sciences, engineering, CS, social sciences, like psychology. Anything where you're really going to have to be in a space with a mentor, you want to have two hour time blocks, typically between Monday to Friday, nine to five because that's when your mentors will often be there. You also need to ask yourself, are you ready to commit to a consistent weekly schedule or at least one semester? And I guess most importantly, you know, are you excited about this? Is research something that you really want to do? And if you've answered, you know, "yes, I'm ready!" I know I'm ready, I have time, I have capacity, and I'm excited. Then you want to do a little bit more internal exploration about why research itself. And I'm not saying these things to be, I don't want this to be boring, but this is really important for and it will help you do a better job when it comes to the actual step-by-step finding research experiences. As I ask these next set of questions, I'm going to you can actually find these questions and things to ask yourself on our engineering getting started in research site, so these are not engineering specific. This is whatever field of study you're interested in. These are the questions to ask yourself about finding research. So basically ask yourself, why do you want to do research? And narrow in on that a little bit? Do you expect research to prepare you for a certain career path, or is it part of your exploration? What are a few skills that you want to gain from this and really think broadly here. Does it mean communication, teamwork, leadership, or are there specific skills? Like, you want to learn to culture bacteria or you want to learn to use software, like R, Python, CAD? What do you want to learn? Or are you trying to learn how to do archival work? So, what skills are you going to walk away with? Are there any specific topics you want to explore? And that question can be a really tough one. Thanks, Jess, also please check out the research module in the Career Development Toolkit. That goes way into detail on how to think about these things, how to reflect, how to dig into what you want to do? So when you're thinking about what topics you want to explore, you might just say, Oh, I'm thinking really broad. I'm interested in biology in general or ask yourself to try to get a little more narrow. Are there classes that you've taken that you are really excited about regarding research or topics or subjects that you're excited about? Have you watched some TV special? What gets you excited? And a few other logistics that you really want to think about, consider whether you wanted to do work for pay for credit or volunteering and how many hours you have to do those things. Okay. Now that I couldn't not talk about those reflection questions. Now let's dig into some exactly how to how do you actually find your research experience? And I'm going to invite you to do some of this along with me if you haven't already. I would like you to go to the website Forager One.com If you've done this already, it might take you to your profile. But if you haven't, I'm going to share my screen. Okay. If you haven't been to Forager One before, it'll take you to a screen that looks a little bit like this one. And then you'll want to click on the sign up button on the top right. When you do that, you're going to be asked to select your institution. So go ahead and select Cornell University. And then it's going to bring you to this page that you know and love logging in with your net ID. So go ahead and do that. Log onto Forager one, Log in with your net ID and password. And this website which we'll all take a look at together in just a second. It is a great tool. It's a way for you to search faculty and researchers from all over Cornell. All right. Once you've logged in. Is everyone doing okay there log ins going pretty well? Give me some thumbs up or let me know if you have any concerns in the chat. You're going to log in and you're going to be invited to create a profile and and go through an input some information about yourself. You name, your degree, what year you're in, graduate, your GPA, if you want to share it, your college, major, and skills that you have. You're also going to be invited to do a couple of toggle switches. Are you seeking opportunities right now? That's where if you're like, Yes, I'm looking for research, you go ahead and switch that toggle on. You'll also be asked if you're looking for collaborators, if you're looking for other students to work with, so you can turn that on or off. Then you'll be able to upload some supplemental files like a resume or a transcript. They'll be some sections for about you, research, keywords, things you're excited about, some experience. At any point, if you're looking for some guidance on what a profile will look like, If you search for the student Joe Smith, this is a sample profile you can look at at any time. Something to note about when you're creating your own profile in here. Not all of the variables that you input are actually going to be visible publicly. On your profile, you'll be able to edit various sections of your profile or see the public view. You can see when I put public view on here, you're not going to see anything like GPA. That's private to you. That's just something that's in there that we can use for either data data purposes, but it's not that faculty or potential mentors will ever be able to see when they're searching for you. This is what the profile will look like. So that's the first step of getting started in Forger One is creating your profile. So I do highly recommend that you take time to do this and you take time to do it well. The more detail you put into this, the more appealing you're going to be to potential mentors. And I do recommend if you have a resume that you can share, go ahead and do that. If not, your career services offices, either central career services or within your college are fantastic resources for getting feedback on a resume. And the Career Toolkit that was put in the chat earlier has a great module on resume creation as well. All right. Now the fun stuff here. Let's say you're excited and you want to look for research opportunities. Well, there's a couple of things you can do here. There is a section for funding and external opportunities. This is relatively a new section. Right now, all you see in there is the section that you're at right now. But we're currently reaching out to folks around the university and they'll be posting various opportunities as they come up. You can see those there. And something else that you'll be able to do is search for research mentors. The first place to start is really with this faculty staff faculty staff section. Now, there's a lot of ways you can use this. You can search or all faculty staff. You can search for faculty and staff who are currently accepting students. What that means is faculty have created their profile and toggled the switch saying, Yes, I would like to see students right now, and this little blue I'm accepting students button will pop up if that's the case. At the. This might seem like a really great choice. Limit that. I would actually say when you're starting out, don't limit by that factor. Reason being, there are faculty who have profiles that just have chose not to switch that toggle switch on or off at all. Then there are faculty who have their profiles created, but haven't clicked the claim button yet. They haven't just logged in to accept students. At first, I would say, start your search broad. There's also a section for searching faculty with posted projects. Some faculty have gone in and created specific projects that you can apply to. That's also a great thing to search for. But again, when you're looking broadly, I wouldn't limit it by that. And the same thing, there's some faculty with remote projects. Currently, we just have one faculty member in our system with a remote project. Other things you can search by. If you're looking within projects, you can limit that to what specific type of project they're looking for. Then you also can see division and department down here. You can search by college. If you want to search say your major, you can search, who's in here from Animal Sciences? You can check that out. Or you can pick pick college specific major. Again, I would actually caution you maybe not to narrow in just yet by your specific college or major because the reason the system is so great is you're going to be able to find folks doing research in a given area across departments. For those of you who are here and excited about research, could you throw in the chat, like a field of study that you're interested in right now? So just some topics that you're thinking about getting started with or what you would like to explore. You're supposed to do. Yeah. In the chat, go ahead and just throw in. What are some topics you might be interested in doing research with. We'll try some neuro let's try neurobiology. When we search neurobiology, we get a few folks here three pages of faculty. If we go with something a little bit more specific because neurobiology is also one of those departments. Let's try semiconductors. Someone put that in there. We get 20 faculty, and when you search a term like that like semiconductors, you're going to get people across departments we've got material, science, electrical engineering. We've got just across fields, applying engineering physics, design tech. Similarly, Another great example if anyone's thinking about genetics or actually microbiology is another good one. You'll find faculty doing genetics research across colleges, like ag, arts, CS, engineering, vet med, human ecology, pretty much all of the colleges. Check that. Try checking different key words to search your faculty. Next, I would like to show you a little bit when you're searching faculty and you find somebody you're interested in. Let's say you're thinking, Oh, genetics, his work looks really good. I want fruit flies and evolution awesome. I want to bookmark this faculty. When you hit bookmark, they'll save that bookmark and you can go back through and look at all the faculty you've bookmarked students sort through them over time, but looking at this bookmark button at the top. I would say, first, after you've reflected, know what you want to study, make a bookmarked list of faculty. Start somewhere with five to ten, something like that. Don't go to into it. Then the next thing to do is to reach out and contact them. Some faculty like Ian Hewson have specific departments or specific projects posted. We can go back to the full profile here. Okay. Cool, I've got these projects posted. Let's say, I'm really interested in sea urchin and pathogens. I'm going to compose a request and reach out to this professor and let him know I'm interested. I'll show you at the top, who you're writing to. If there are specific projects posted, there'll be this drop down menu where you can select. I'm interested in both projects. I'm just interested in this sea urchin project. You select what you're interested in. Me. And then you type an interest statement. Now, when you're doing this section, this is the part where it's really critical that you are writing a unique message to individual faculty members. And you can put and there's some tips here on the side and an example here. You really want to say, I would start with, you know, who are you? What major what major are you? Why are you reaching out to this faculty member specifically? And then what might you bring to this research group? And that might mean you have previous research experience, but it might not. This comes as a surprise to a lot of students, but it is not expected that you have previous research experience before joining a lob. The skills that you bring might be things like that you have from other jobs. Like if you are in, say, like retail or you are in food service, you might have a lot of experience organizing things. Multitasking, keeping a lot of things going at once. You might have cut dealing with people, communicating across difficult environments. Whatever skills you have. This is also a place to mention relevant coursework that you've taken. And then lastly, we recommend that you reach out and ask a question. I generally recommend asking, would you have time to meet to talk about your research and try to get a time to meet them. So once you compose this interest statement, you can then also choose to attach any supplemental files you have, if you have a resume, if you want to share your transcript, you can do that. You click that. And then if you can hit preview and submit, and it'll take you to a page where it will it'll preview for you. Statement, and you click submit. I'm not going to do that to fill up his inbox here. But what will happen then is the message you can pose in this system will go directly to the faculty's Forager One account, but also to their email. So it'll go in directly and they can actually reply to you directly from their e mail, which is awesome too. So go ahead and contact faculty right through this system. And a couple other That's the big overview. Yeah, we'll move into questions in just a second. Some things to think about if let's say you contact a faculty number and they don't reach back out to you right away. I would say wait a week. Follow up with them again. And so don't give up if you don't get a response right away. We have a question in the chat. A really good question. Should you use the same statement of interest for each person? No. The first part of the statement of interest, the part where you explained to the faculty member, why are you interested in them specifically, that part should be different for each person. The reason being faculty tend to prefer students who have shown that they've done a bit of research into the labs that the labs or the research groups that they're thinking about joining. So, for example, let's say you're interested in economics. If you were writing more broadly about your interest in economics, that's, you know, that's great. But the faculty is specifically doing some sort of behavioral economics and how, like personal experiences or socioeconomic status influences, decision making. It's going to be much more powerful if you can specifically say why you're interested in their work. The best way to get a good sense of that is on those faculty profiles. Most a lot of faculty have included their website. If you go to that website, you can learn basically the most up to date information on what they're studying right now. This other part of the statement, the parts about you and what you bring, that's more likely to be the same for anyone that you contact. Great. Other questions. Oh, such a good question. When should you send out e mails or messages to Forger One? So I, usually you want to start thinking about this at least a month, a month or more before you're interested in actually starting research. If you're thinking about starting research, and this is really true regardless of your class year, whether you're a first year or sophomore. Though I would say for first year students, make sure you're feeling well established in your courses and comfortably academically before adding additional extracurriculars. But let's say you're thinking about starting research in the spring semester. A great time to start. There's a couple windows that are really good for that. Reaching out in November, December can be a really good time or winter break. Maybe the second week in January, folks often travel the first part of break, or take time away. But they're often back at it in January. Early mid January before the semester starts is a really good time to reach out. Similarly, if you're thinking for the fall semester, a good time is either the end of the spring semester, April, May, thinking for head to fall or in August before you actually come back. Summer is a different story. If you're thinking about summer, if you're looking for funding for summer, you're going to have to start thinking about this as early as November, December, depending on the college that you're in and the funding sources you're applying to. Really good question. How likely is it that a professor will have a first year student join their research lab? That's actually going to be pretty variable. But I will tell you that a lot of faculty really like having students earlier in their academic career. The reason being is if it's a good fit and it's going well and you like it and they like it, you might stay in that lab for almost four years, which is spectacular because you'll be so well trained and you'll become more and more independent with time that you become an incredible contributor. If research is something that you're passionate about, starting early can be a great thing to do. But again, there are some faculty and some fields where that might be a little bit different. And it depends on the individual faculty member, so I don't want to call out specific fields, but I'm thinking about more theoretical fields. Math or any involves a lot of theory or let's say you have to have a lot of coding or skills before you can even start doing the work. If you're interested in doing research over the summer, should you specify that in your initial message? Definitely. Yeah, because if you're thinking about staying over the summer, you might say, I'd love to get getting started in research. I'm thinking about starting next semester, and I'd be able to stay over the summer. That's fantastic because then you really get an immersive experience, and you can learn a lot really quickly. Faculty often do really like to work with students who are interested in committing a summer to research. Definitely mention that. Is it too late to apply for a lab experience in the spring semester as a junior? No, it's not. Another great thing too you really want to think about this from the perspective of where you're coming from and what your advantages are, right? If you are an early, say a first year or a sophomore, you haven't taken as many classes yet. You don't have as many skills. So you really want to leverage, I can be here a long time. I'm super excited. You know, I do have some experiences and I can I have lots of summers that I could potentially choose one or more to dedicate to this. That's a great advantage. If you're a junior, you have the coursework. You have more experience. You might have experience with an internship or you might have volunteer experience or club experience. That brings you with greater skills. You can often dive in more quickly. If you are a junior, I would say start looking sooner rather than later. If you have the capacity even to start doing a little bit in the fall semester, that's a great choice, but if your coursework doesn't allow for that, or so you're abroad or something like that, starting in the spring is absolutely reasonable. You still have a whole year and a half that you could be in the lab. Do professors have a preference for sophomores and juniors because they're more skilled and more settled? Not necessarily. This is a very individualized question. Some faculty will have some faculty will have a strong preference. Some faculty will say it depends completely on the students. Some faculty really don't have preferences at all. I can't give you a really satisfying answer to that one. Well, thank you all so much for being here. I will stick around for a few minutes if you have other questions that you'd like to ask. I'm really excited that you're looking at getting involved in research. Research is an extraordinary, really fun thing to do. It's an incredible learning experience. And here at Cornell, we have so many amazing projects you can join. The skills that you gain gain from research are really applicable no matter what fields you go into. Whether you pursue research in your future or not, the skills in critical thinking, communication, and teamwork are highly applicable no matter what you do next. So I really hope you have a fantastic research journey here at Cornell. Thank you for coming.