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Doing Research at NEU

3/19/2021 - Post #3

 

Hi all! I hope you are doing well. Today I wanted to talk about doing research at Northeastern, how I got into it, and some other strategies you might like to use to get involved.

First, what research I do and how I got into it. I am a research assistant in the biocomputational lab led by Dr. Matthew Goodwin (learn more about him and his work here, he is an amazing researcher:

https://bouve.northeastern.edu/bchs/directory/matthew-goodwin/) To sum it up, Dr. Goodwin has been a researcher in Autism for many years, and the work we are doing is to improve daily life of an autistic child and their family through video coding technology. As an RA, I do video coding using a specialized software and a coding schema developed by the pre/post doctorate students on the team. How did I get to be a part of this team?

In your 1st semester, you take a class called "introduction to college" with a designated professor from your home college. My professor, Annemarie Sullivan, went out of her way to present us with great opportunities on and off campus, and one of these included having her colleagues coming in and talking about their research. Dr. Goodwin was one of the speakers that came into my class, and I really liked hearing what he had to say. His research combined mental/physical health, as well as computational sciences, an area of intersection I find really interesting. After his presentation, I emailed him asking if there was any way I could help out with his team, and it grew from there!



A lot of times, simply researching an area of interest and finding a professor involved in it is enough to at least get started somewhere. I didn't have a lot of computational science experience, but some of my classes (most notably, biostatistics) prepared me well to think more analytically.

NEU offers some other ways to get involved in research, one of which is this website (https://undergraduate.northeastern.edu/research/research-opportunities/search/#/). This website can connect students to faculty specifically looking for student assistants across many disciplines. Some of these can even be eligible for work-study funding! Some of these can also be eligible for the honors research grant if you are in the honors program.

Hopefully, this will give you a good place to start if you are interested in research. Just remember that the worst thing you can be told is no - go make connections, and put yourself out there!


Until next time,

Marcie :)

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Hi, I appreciate you stopping by!

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