How to Set Up and Run an Undergraduate Research Lab

Supporting yourself • Building a lab • Conclusions

Imagine you’re training to be a chef. You learn cooking techniques and develop intuitions about flavor pairings, and, after a long period of training, you land your first real job as a chef. As you walk in the door, your boss says, “Welcome to being a chef! There’s just this one little thing—you also need to grow all your own food.”

This is what becoming the primary investigator (PI) of a lab can feel like. Folks starting their first research job are likely to be well versed in their discipline but may have no guidance in methods for recruiting students to work with them, delegating and assigning work, balancing a budget, and many other tasks needed to successfully run a lab. 

I have spent the last 15 years teaching and running a productive research lab at Carleton College (a small, undergraduate-only liberal arts college). I have regularly been asked for advice on engaging undergraduates as meaningful research collaborators. This article offers resources and recommendations gleaned from my experience, with the hope that they may be useful to others working in similar contexts. 

Supporting yourself 

Find mentors 

My strongest piece of advice when starting out is to seek out mentorship. By mentorship, I do not mean finding one source of wise guidance and doing whatever they tell you to (the Yoda model of mentorship). Instead, I recommend seeking out people who are a bit farther along on your path and have your best interests at heart. These can be people you talk to regularly or people you feel comfortable emailing with random questions or having coffee with occasionally as issues come up. Aim to seek out an assortment of mentors, perhaps including 

• teaching mentors: senior colleagues in your department who have experience with the students, classroom expectations, and pace of your institution
• research mentors: people who know your research area well (at your institution or elsewhere) who you can go to for advice about scholarship
• institutional norm mentors: people at your institution in a different department who can help you understand your department in context
• life mentors: people you can chat with about work/life balance and how to deal with demands that are specific to features of your identity or experience 

How do you build this network of mentors? Invite somebody to have coffee and ask them some questions, then ask if you can email them if things come up in the future. Most people like to give their advice to junior faculty and are eager to share their experiences! 

You should also become familiar with the support staff at your institution. Folks in IT, the library, and student support services are an invaluable resource that can make your life much easier. 

Learn the expectations of your institution and department 

As part of your hiring process, you’ve likely chatted with the department chair and administration about research expectations. In the Carleton Psychology Department, the expectation is that faculty will be actively engaged in scholarship and be training undergraduates in the process of research. Your institution or department may prioritize the two arms of this differently: Would your institution prefer that you publish more papers with less student involvement or fewer papers but engage students more heavily? Of course, the answer is likely to be “publish a lot, and with undergraduates!” but posing the question may help identify where priorities lie. You should also talk about the norms in the department for when and how research with students typically happens.

Related content: Resources on Teaching Psychological Science

When you first get a job as a professor, you may have taught some courses on your own, but you have certainly taken lots of courses, meaning you have accrued various models of how classes can be run. By contrast, you’ve likely only worked in a couple of labs so have much more limited experience in how labs can be run. Therefore, seek out examples and feel free to draw from what others are doing.

Think about what will work for you 

One of the real joys of academia is having agency over how you structure your time. However, without explicit guidelines about what you should be doing, it may be easy to assume the right thing to do is to work all the damn time. Not only is this unlikely to be sustainable as a strategy, but it is not conducive to being a happy person. Part of entering this new role should also be thinking about how work practices will affect your life. Here are some questions to consider: 

• How accessible do you want to be to your students? Are you open to being contacted out of normal work hours?
• How much time do you spend in the lab, working with students, and how much do you want to train them and then let them work independently?
• How involved in your students’ lives outside the lab do you want to be? Supporting them through issues that aren’t related to the lab (e.g., classes, their personal lives) can be rewarding and help you get to know them better—and also takes time and effort.
• How hands-on do you want to be in students’ work? More oversight may help ensure work is done the way you want it the first time, but it also requires more time and energy on your part.
• Do you want to bring students to conferences? This can be a great learning experience for them but, again, also requires time and energy from you. 

Your answers to these questions may change over time, and they may vary depending on your roles and commitments outside of your job. I encourage you to explore what you need to do to be a happy person and arrange your work to fit that, rather than making work the first priority and trying to fit life in the gaps.

Building a lab 

Logistics 

My research lab during the academic year consists of up to 10 undergraduates. Those students are split into two groups who work on different projects and go to separate lab meetings, so each lab group consists of four to five students. I’ve found that when lab groups get bigger than this, it’s harder for students to feel invested in the project, and diffusion of responsibility can emerge. 

Students enroll in a research lab course (akin to an independent study) for academic credit with the expectation of 6–8 hours of work each week. That time is split between lab meetings, independent work, working in small groups with me or other students, and collecting data.

Before students register for classes for the following term, I poll them about when their classes are likely to be and then choose lab meeting times based on mutual availability. Another approach would be to set a consistent lab meeting time and tell students they have to make that time work if they want to be in the lab. This would be logistically simpler but may mean students can’t be involved in the lab in a given term if they have a required class that conflicts with it. 

Recruiting and onboarding 

I bring new students into my lab once or twice a year. To select students, I put up fliers around campus and email relevant listservs. In those emails, I ask students to fill out an application form. From these forms, I select students to interview (here is the information I give them when they interview). When I tell students they’ve been selected for an interview, I ask them to read a recent piece of scholarship from the lab and come with questions. This means they know what they’re getting into (content wise) and allows us to have a substantive conversation about the topic.

I primarily select students who seem genuinely interested in the research area and are enthusiastic about learning how science works. Having a conversation about the lab’s research area helps me get a sense of that. To me, this is a better indication of success in the lab than relevant coursework or GPA. I teach students the content they need to be successful in the lab, so there aren’t relevant courses I require.

I also try to select students across a range of class years and majors. My preference is to recruit students in their first or second year with the expectation that I can then work with them for multiple years before they graduate. 

In my first years running the lab, I would simply incorporate new students into the existing research group, with the expectation that new students would learn from the more senior students. An unexpected consequence of this approach was that the new students were also massively intimidated. Being thrust in with a group who was older, had more experience with the lab structure, and were already familiar with the literature led their imposter syndrome to flare.

Related content: Surviving Imposter Phenomenon: One Psychological Scientist’s Story

Now when new students join the lab, I have them work with the existing groups, but in their first term, I also have them attend a weekly meeting of only new students. In those meetings, we talk about lab expectations, discuss foundational studies and approaches in our research area, and talk through how the process of doing science affects the work we produce. We discuss imposter syndrome and how feelings of intimidation when joining a new group do not reflect anything about the students’ abilities or potential.

New student lab meetings are really fun. Each week, they have a reading assignment and then the majority of the meeting time is spent with students asking questions about it. The only goal of these meetings is to learn, rather than trying to make progress on a research project. Therefore, we are more free to follow discussions and explore their curiosity. It also helps the students and I get to know each other well and build trust. I suspect that taking this time to get to know each other early helps the students feel comfortable coming to me with questions and concerns in the future. 

The outline of our new-students-only meeting is here. I select topics that every student who passes through my lab is familiar with, even if their current research topic doesn’t address it. To facilitate our discussion, we use a document called “The Perception Lab Crash Course.” This is a review paper originally written by a lab alumnus that has subsequently been edited and revised by lab students, alumni, and me. The Crash Course reviews the main research areas of the lab and describes how our work fits into the literature. It is an accessible way to introduce students to the key ideas you’ll be focusing on without making them read long review papers written for other purposes. Although you won’t have a Crash Course when you begin, it’s a great project to assign students to write sections of as they begin reviewing the relevant literature! 

Policies 

As you begin figuring out how you want things in your lab to work, I’d encourage you to make those expectations explicit in a lab manual. This will save you time in the future and avoid misunderstandings if students don’t understand your expectations. Here’s my lab handbook, and here is a paper about why lab handbooks are so valuable. 

I’ve also found it very helpful to keep a project log for every project that details every decision made about the project and by whom. It serves as a record against memory failures, keeps people accountable for the work they’ve done, and helps guide decisions about authorship at the end of a project. Our project log is a shared google doc in which we date and briefly describe our contributions, but any form of collaboratively edited document or digital lab notebook would work.

Getting stuff done 

I’ve been continually impressed with what highly motivated, smart undergraduates can accomplish in research. The elements that I’ve found key to accomplishing this include: 

• Make your expectations clear. Undergraduates are capable of a lot, but they likely have not yet developed the same kinds of intuitions you have about what needs to be done to further a project. I end each lab meeting with explicit assignments about what should be done by the following lab meeting.
• Give them a stake in projects. Let them know they are research collaborators and not just research “assistants.” I try to achieve this by keeping groups small enough that people are able to actively contribute and by acknowledging the work they do. I also try to structure lab meetings around people reporting back about what they’ve worked on and what they think needs to be done next. This helps set the tone that lab meetings are something they help run, not just something they show up for.
• Write things up early. When we’re starting a new project, we begin by writing the introduction and methods section of the paper we are working on. Front-loading the process of writing has many advantages for the research, and it also has pedagogical advantages. When new students join the group, a written document can be a helpful resource for understanding the project and facilitates them becoming contributing members of the team more quickly. 

Authorship practices 

Many of the students who work in my laboratory are authors on the manuscripts we produce. The authorship policies in my lab handbook are as follows: 

We practice two types of formal, academic recognition: authorship and acknowledgment. Authorship includes listing your name as an author on a project’s publications. Acknowledgement consists of mentioning your name in the acknowledgement section of a paper or poster.

Authorship: Authorship is the recognition of individuals that make direct and substantial intellectual contributions to a project. This may include coming up with the idea for the study, making significant contributions to the design, planning and running the analysis, or contributing substantively to writing. Collecting data, participating in discussions about the project that don’t substantially affect the course of the project, and reading/editing drafts of the paper are not sufficient to warrant authorship.

Acknowledgement: If an individual’s contributions are notable, but outside the parameters of authorship, the individual will be recognized in the acknowledgment section of publications. 

Most commonly, I am responsible for setting the big research question and then the team and I work together to design and implement it. In those cases, I’ll be the first author and include students in descending order of contribution. Sometimes, individual students have been the driving force behind proposing and designing an experiment, but it is relatively rare to have the experience and expertise to conduct truly independent research as an undergraduate. In those cases, the student will be the first author and I’ll be at the end. 

Conclusions 

It is very normal to feel somewhat overwhelmed in a new teaching role. Teaching students how to do research was the thing I felt the least equipped to do when I first became a professor. Now it has become one of the most rewarding parts of my job. 

As you begin, keep in mind that there is no “right” way to run a lab, and that you are very likely to change how you do things over time. Set up your lab with the understanding that your model will shift as you learn more about what works for you.

Good luck on your journey!

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