Assumptions, Reality, and Tips on Starting Research in Biology

The media often depicts scientists as all-knowing and able to produce a miracle cure in mere hours. As a Biology student starting your first research experience, you are likely well aware that the science you see on TV is very far removed from science in reality. However, early-stage researchers often have to reckon with unexpected realities about lab work. This collection of assumptions, reality, and tips was assembled to give you and your mentors jumping-off points to discuss expectations for your research experience in the lab.

Assumption 1: The things I like about studying biology will carry over to research.

Reality: Yes and no. Many people are drawn to biology as a field because it contains so many things to learn. Understanding how the molecules in your body work together is really cool! However, research as an occupation is full of uncertainty, which is very different from learning dogmas and well-established models in lecture. You have to accept that you will reach the end of the field’s knowledge of your topic, and that only braving through the uncertainty and conducting necessary research will advance your understanding.

Tip: When you start research on a topic, even if you’ve learned about it in class before, you will go into much further detail. Reading the primary literature and understanding the details of how other scientists performed experiments is a different type of learning! Eventually, you will become very familiar with the existing knowledge about your topic, and spot understudied areas on which to focus your research.

Assumption 2: I’ll be doing experiments whenever I’m in the lab.

Reality: Yes, experiments are important—but you also need to find out what the results mean! For a given experiment, you may need to quantify the results and analyze them with statistics. If the results are more qualitative, like in the case of a gel, you may need to sit down and brainstorm why your results are different from the predicted outcome, and figure out what that means for your experimental design and what to do next. Additionally, reading scientific papers, writing up your results, and submitting funding applications are all big parts of a researcher’s life. For the first few weeks in the lab, you will likely be shadowing your mentor to learn techniques. Later on, even if you don’t have publishable data (which is completely normal!), it’s important to take the time to learn to make quality figures and slides that are understandable to an audience beyond you. Finally, a lot of biological experiments take time! You might set up an enzymatic reaction and then have an hour or two of downtime. 

Tip: Share your feelings with your mentor. Research takes time to get used to, and if you find yourself overwhelmed or understimulated, you should work together to find a better pace and schedule for your work. Asking for papers to read, or concepts to look up and become familiar with, will be especially valuable for your understanding of the project and the field itself. You should consider setting up a weekly meeting to check in, communicate your feelings, and make sure that you are getting the most out of your research experience.

Assumption 3: Good research has to be completely original and distinct from what has been done before.

Reality: Rigorous academic research almost always builds on prior work, whether that be work performed by your research mentor and other lab members before you joined, or work from a different lab. To design an experiment, you need to have sufficient background to form a testable hypothesis. This is impossible if you are trying to design an experiment on something which you know nothing about. Ideas can float around a field for years before they are able to be confirmed! Moreover, new methods are always in development to improve our ability to study and measure biological phenomena, and to validate a method, you have to show that it can reproduce results that were shown before. Your work will build upon what came before, but there will always be a novel element that is the focus of the project.

Tip: If the project is ongoing, ask your mentors how they devised it at the beginning. Like a detective, you can go through the papers and observations they made that have brought you to the current project.  

Assumption 4: My research has to produce a paper in order to be meaningful.

Reality: Research occupies a unique space as both a profession, where the output is published work, and a training system, where the output is accomplished trainees who gain research skills. As an early-stage researcher, it is important to focus your time and efforts on mastering experimental protocols, because the only way to get usable data is to be rigorous and reproducible in your work. Even though on paper your project will not progress rapidly in the beginning, being careful and cautious is the only way to become successful. At the end of your research experience, you do not need to produce a paper or even a figure to have done meaningful work: the process of calibrating assays and troubleshooting are critical steps of the scientific process. 

Tip: When you meet with your lab’s PI, ask them what success as an undergraduate researcher or research intern would look like in their group. You can also share your goals and expectations for this experience, and make sure that you and the PI are on the same page.

Assumption 5: The proposed project timeline will be the actual timeline.

Reality: It’s an unofficial rule that nearly every experiment you try will fail the first, second, and probably third time. It may take you four times as many weeks as you thought to get through the first step of a project! But PIs and research professionals are well aware of this, so don’t stress too much about how fast you’re moving forward. What we think of as one experiment failing five times is often actually an experiment failing once, then being slightly changed and failing again, etc…which really amounts to five different experiments that needed to fail so that you discovered the right set of conditions to get the sixth version to work. 

Tip: Take a step back from the failures and make a list of all the things you’ve changed since first starting to work on an experiment. That’s progress! But if you’re unsure whether you’re making progress, ask your research mentor and PI to brainstorm together to find different ways to approach the problem.