On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 05:12:50PM -0400, Vito Miliano wrote: > > I asked this same question on this list a while back (looking to get > into the same things, incidentally), and the biggest thing I took away > from the response I got (both on the list and privately), was that in > the majority of schools, undergraduates aren't allowed to touch > anything. This isn't true at all. Freshmen might be discouraged, but not necessarily denied if they could prove themself. Starting my junior year I participated in a lab quite heavily (60-80 hour weeks during the summer). While my name didn't make any of the papers from the lab (I didn't actually write any of them, so that doesn't bother me) I would often help them poke holes in their arguements, or the arguements of others which they were refuting. The lab director served as a moderator for several conferences and would often hand papers to the people in the lab for critique. I'm not sure I would have wanted to do this research as a freshman, nor do I think it would be suitable for the average freshman to be working in a research lab, but depending on the nature of the lab and the professors (and maybe some department policies) it's not even close to impossible. > > Even the schools where I'd been asked to attend by the professors > (whom I knew through private sector work) who wanted me to work on > their research with them, when told I would be a freshman, the > indication was that it might be a problem. That might be a department policy, but if the professor really want's you, chances are generally good that they can work something out. I was offered my research position after taking a class from the guy that ran the lab. He was competing against a summer consulting job that paid considerably more. I told him what the numbers I was looking at were and where he'd need to be for me to take it and things worked out. If they can increase the pay rate to almost double normal, they can probably make something work for a freshman. BTW - I was at Carnegie Mellon working in a lab doing intrusion detection research in the CS dept. I had friends working in the wearable lab, robotics labs, physics research labs, and some in Herb Simon sponsored projects dealing with AI (Nobel prize winner -- he had a budget for pet projects). While there was a lot of grunt work (writing code) involved, the grad students in the lab had their fair share of it. My project had the lab director, a grad student, and 4 undergrads -- you'd better believe that the undergrads were doing meaningful work. -charlie -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
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