What is Academic Research and Why Do it

The Ultimate Guide to Undergrad Research Part One

Disclaimer: An LLM was used for light editing of this article.

Introduction

After reading this article, geared towards those unfamiliar with academia, you will know:

what professors really do all day
what academic research entails
pros and cons of trying out academic research for yourself

This article is part one of my guide to undergraduate research (remaining articles forthcoming):

The Ultimate Guide to Undergrad Research Part One : What is Academic Research and Why Do it
The Ultimate Guide to Undergrad Research Part Two : How to Join a Research Lab
The Ultimate Guide to Undergrad Research Part Three : Doing Productive Research
The Ultimate Guide to Undergrad Research Part Four : Graduate School, Mentorship, Lab Meetings, and Summer Research

This guide is oriented towards STEM majors at US research universities . It is informed by my personal experience and contains everything research-related I wish I knew my freshman year . I try to incorporate simple language and structure; a big-picture perspective; high-quality reference material (seriously check it out!); and absurdly practical, easy-to-follow advice.

Hopefully this guide will help you avoid some of the mistakes I made along my own research journey.

What Professors Really Do All Day

Before I began research, I thought of professors as teachers and teachers alone. After all, I interacted with professors in the classroom, office hours, and that one awkward time in the bathroom. However, teaching is actually a small part of their job.

Tenure-track professors actually spend most of their time working on academic research. This means they develop novel discoveries in their area of expertise, elaborated on below.

To conduct academic research, professors run research labs that hire graduate students (people getting a PhD) and post-docs (people who already have a PhD) to work on a variety of projects. Professors apply for ultra-competitive grants to fund and hire these lab members.

Professors are evaluated primarily by their research output – this is why research is their top priority. (In my opinion, this leads to a fundemental value misalignemnet in research universities: undergraduates optimize for professor pedagody but university hiring committees optimize for professor research ability.)

The job of a professor is hardly a “nine-to-five” because they are ultimately responsible for so much:

Teaching courses (lecturing, running office hours, creating assignements, organizing teaching assistants)
Supervising graduate students and post-docs
Applying for grants to fund their lab
Review papers for peer-review, volunteer as editors academic journals, and serve in university departement positions (e.g. departement chair, undergrad major advisor)
Actually producing novel discoveries at the boundary of human knowledge

What Academic Research Entails

Academic research is the art of making new, novel, and bleeding edge discoveries. In STEM fields, this can take the form of training the lastest and greatest AI model, synthesizing a new molecule, or proving properties of an algorithm.

Doing research is really really hard. In my opinion, research is intrinsically hard because:

there is no “correct” answer
the low-hanging fruit is likely already taken: subject-matter experts may have already spent time thinking about your exact problem and published their findings

The nitty-gritty details of what research actually entails is subject-specfic. Following the examples above, it may include writing machine learning code, chemistry benchwork in the lab, or proof-based math on a chalkboard.

On a high level, research can be split into two steps (this is a distinction I like to make and is far from a universally agreed upon characterization):

generating a novel idea
testing the novel idea

Undergrad researchers are often given an idea to test out, beginning at step two of the research process. Over the course of graduate school, students transition to step one and learn to develop their own ideas i.e. research taste. (I also have not attended graduate school so take my analysis with a bit of .)

Personally, I do not know how to generate truly novel research ideas – I have not done it yet. However to test an idea, one often implements (codes up, synthesizes, builds, etc.) the idea and then evaluates it against prior work – this often takes months to do. (Theoretical research may not follow this type of implement-evaluate workflow.)

At some point in a research project – whether generating or testing a novel idea – it is helpful to become familiar with “the literature” i.e. previously published papers on the topic you are researching.

Thus the research workflow is very loosely approximated by:

read some papers ➡️ generate a novel idea ➡️ test the idea ➡️ publish the idea

Though of course research is much more complex and non-linear in practice. To understand what research really entails, one must try it out for themselves.

Trying Out Academic Research For Yourself

Below are the pros and cons of trying out research for yourself, as an undergrad.

Pros

Interesting Work : In my opinion, this is the by far the most important reason to try out research. You are no longer exploring subjects with known answers. Instead, you are pushing the frontier of human knowledge forward. This is incredibly exciting and challenging. When trying out research, you will spend hours and hours working on something that just might be crazy enough to work.
PhD Programs : Doing research as an undergrad allows you to test your fit for PhD programs (do you like research?) and to get admittted to PhD programs (do you already know how to do research?). Without research, you will not be able to answer these questions.
Resume Boost : The skills you learn doing research – critical thinking, independent work, and impressive technical skills – are highly desired, especially in fields like tech and quantitative finance.

Cons

Large Time Commitement : Doing good research takes an immense amount of time – many professors will have a student pledge north of 10-20 hours per week. Managing this time commitement is especially difficult when balancing other commitements like coursework and a social life. However, I believe producing good research is more of a function of time than raw intellectual horsepower > .
Low Pay : As an undergrad, most research positions are unpaid. This is because you are not yet a skilled researcher and are not expected to produce novel results – your mentor often helps you more than you help them. However, there are occasionally some paid research positions for undergrads, especially in the summer.
Long Feedback Loops : Unlike courseswork, research has no clear right answer. Thus it often takes months, sometimes even years, before you know if your research is “good” or “bad”. This can be frustrating for students who are used to getting quick feedback on their work.