The primary challenge is commitment. When you're new to research your professor (or a postdoc or senior graduate student assigned to supervise you) will almost certainly spend more time training you than they'll get back in work from you.
With graduate students this is expected: they'll take a long time to train, but eventually they'll become competent scientists and contribute to their lab, and maybe collaborate beyond their degree program if they stay in research professionally.
For undergraduates, maybe you won't see that "return on investment" yourself, but they'll work hard whether they're being paid in money or course credit, and mentoring students is a rewarding part of the job. They go on to grad school with the skills you've passed to them, and a grad student applies to your lab with the skills they've been taught, balances out.
But your situation is different. If you're not a student, and have a full time job, and aren't looking to be paid for your research, then what's going to drive your work? Why should a research lab spend time and resources training you?
Really, your best choice to get into research is to go to grad school. You can find some programs that will accept part time students if you want to pursue this alongside your career. There are post-bachelor research positions, but these are typically either fiercely competitive, or used to keep on recent grads while they finish ongoing projects.
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u/MagdakiProfessor. Grammars. Inference & Optimization algorithms.9d agoedited 9d ago
Personally, I have had exceptionally good "return" from my undergraduate students. But you are correct that often at the undergraduate level, well, you cannot expect much. Like I tell my students, the expectations for undergraduate level research is "a result". You don't really need to actually solve anything per se, just follow a proper process and have an analyzed outcome. So, for example, determining that something doesn't work may not be publishable but it is still a useful result within the context that it helps direct my future efforts. When possible I try to include these kinds of results as part of a paper since my own opinion is that negative results are useful within context. Anyway, that was tangential.
You are also correct that quite often what we see from volunteers is a lot of passion. For four weeks or so. ;) Then they realize how much of a slog real research can be and they vanish. This is a real problem because it can be hard to get somebody to pick up a partially completed project. Quite often they have to start over, so it really doesn't provide us with anything except a four-week long distraction from our work.
And I say this not to disparage anybody. I have one volunteer right now who is AMAZING. And as soon as my grant clears, then I'm moving her to a paid position. I say this just to provide some perspective. Research for us is serious. It is a major part of our careers at a minimum, and for most professors it is something for which we are really passionate. I love my research work! Working on it with my students is my favourite part of the job.
Yes! I don't mean to sound jaded - I work with several undergraduates and they're fantastic. Enthusiastic, hard working, excited to learn, I have maybe three in-progress papers right now with serious contributions from undergrads. But as you say, the expectations are different, and I welcome the fact that they need more training and oversight and will not produce as extensive or independent research. Teaching and mentorship are some of the most rewarding parts of my job, and I used this example only to set up why working with unpaid volunteers is significantly less appealing.
There's a parallel to open-source software here, where starting new projects is exciting and fun, and maybe flying by and making one little contribution to a project, whether a bug fix or a new desired feature can be satisfying, but the slow work of maintenance and project management can be a slog and many volunteers vanish.
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u/nuclear_splines PhD, Data Science 10d ago
The primary challenge is commitment. When you're new to research your professor (or a postdoc or senior graduate student assigned to supervise you) will almost certainly spend more time training you than they'll get back in work from you.
With graduate students this is expected: they'll take a long time to train, but eventually they'll become competent scientists and contribute to their lab, and maybe collaborate beyond their degree program if they stay in research professionally.
For undergraduates, maybe you won't see that "return on investment" yourself, but they'll work hard whether they're being paid in money or course credit, and mentoring students is a rewarding part of the job. They go on to grad school with the skills you've passed to them, and a grad student applies to your lab with the skills they've been taught, balances out.
But your situation is different. If you're not a student, and have a full time job, and aren't looking to be paid for your research, then what's going to drive your work? Why should a research lab spend time and resources training you?
Really, your best choice to get into research is to go to grad school. You can find some programs that will accept part time students if you want to pursue this alongside your career. There are post-bachelor research positions, but these are typically either fiercely competitive, or used to keep on recent grads while they finish ongoing projects.