One of the driving factors behind my decision to attend a small liberal arts college was my desire to enjoy a more personalized academic experience—one where I could form close relationships with my professors and not have to compete with graduate students for research opportunities. I’m happy to report that in my first two years at Swarthmore, I have had a lot of great access to my professors. I’ve spent a lot of time getting one-on-one help in professors’ office hours and taken advantage of the opportunity to do research with a professor in my major department.
Because Swarthmore students don’t declare their major until the end of sophomore year, many students come here without a plan for what they want to major in—and that’s totally ok! Although I was pretty certain that I wanted to be a biology major, and I knew that I wanted to take advantage of the research opportunities available to Swarthmore students, the prospect of finding and joining a research lab seemed daunting. I found that Swat academics were like a more rigorous extension of high school, but joining a professor’s research lab would be an entirely new experience. I knew some people who had jobs in labs—taking care of animals, for example—but I was looking to do research for academic credit, and hopefully to have the opportunity to travel over the summer with my lab. Thankfully, the process of finding and getting accepted into a lab turned out to be easier than I anticipated.
The way the research application process works—in the natural sciences at least—is that departments hold meetings where each of the professors who have openings in their lab give a short presentation about their research topic. Students who attend are encouraged to contact any professor they are interested in working with. Professors often encourage those students to come to their office hours and chat, sometimes sending relevant papers to read in preparation for the meeting. What follows is a lot of back-and-forth interaction between the student and professor. At Swarthmore, professors tend to see research labs as a mutual relationship; they want to make sure that the student is the right fit for their lab, but they also want the student to be certain that the lab is the right fit for them. Sometimes professors reach out to students who they’ve enjoyed working with in class to ask if they’d be interested in joining their lab. Overall, it is a very accessible and personalized process; 66% of Swatties do research at some point during their four years!
During the spring of my sophomore year I started research in the Conservation Bio lab. While research in many labs involves contributing to one of the long-term projects that the professor is engaged in, some other professors, like mine, prefer to support students in developing their own research project from scratch. I appreciated that the process started slowly; I wasn’t expected to come in with a plan and be ready to jump head first into a research project. We had biweekly lab meetings (~3 hours per week) where we read papers, brainstormed research questions, and learned how to code for statistical analysis. By the end of the semester, I had a well-developed research question, an experimental approach, and I had done several rounds of preliminary data collection to troubleshoot the logistics of my plan. This semester, I’m excited to pick up where I left off and continue on my research journey.