by dansmyers | 2025-04-15 00:28:35+00:00
I'm a professor at an undergraduate college. I've supervised honors thesis projects and published papers and posters with students. You've got two main options for doing research as an undergrad:

1. Join an existing research group as an assistant. This is more likely at a big university that emphasizes scholarship and publications. If you take this route, you'll probably have a small part of a larger project and your direct supervisor might be a postdoc or grad student.

2. Work on a complete project, either as an independent study or as an honors-level thesis. This is more common at an undergrad college like mine.

The advantage of (1) is that you'll be exposed to a higher level of research and get a better feel for what grad school is like. The advantage of (2) is that you get to take on the entire research project, including the lit review and writing.

In either case, the professor's research focus will play a big role in the topic of the project. The best advisor is one that you have a good relationship with and who has experience incorporating undergrads into their work. Prioritize that more so than the specific research topic. Think carefully about the scope of the project; a focused project within the supervisor's area of expertise is more likely to succeed. Trying to make up your own topic is probably a bad idea.

I have a few practical tips from previous thesis projects I've supervised:

- If you're doing a senior project, remember that you only have ~8 months, which has to include all the pre-research and writing. You need to be making progress every week. If you get stuck, seek help so you can get unstuck as quickly as possible.

- Schedule time for your research every day like a class. That time is blocked off and you WILL NOT schedule anything else during it. Work in brief, regular sessions. Don't binge.

- Keep backups of all your work, notes, and drafts.

- You may have to do a lit review, but don't get bogged down on it. I frequently see issues with students who try to read "every" paper and lose time that would be better spent on their actual research. You should have 2-3 key papers (ideally identified by your professor) that you work through in detail. You may add other papers, but focus your reading on quickly extracting key points and the context of the paper -- this is an important research skill to develop early. Set an aggressive limit on the size and scope of the lit review so you can finish it and move on to other topics.

- Be careful about projects that require hardware or complex system setups. You can easily lose a lot of time trying to get things to work.

- You might be able to publish something, but don't get hung up on that as an outcome. Posters are a great result for an undergrad project.

- The research question is the driver of the project. Make sure you clearly understand what you want to learn and how the design of your experiments/analysis relates to its answer. Some students fall into the trap of doing "research" that's more of a summary of an area, rather than an original investigation. Again, start with a narrow, carefully-scoped question; you can always broaden the scope if you have time.

I wrote a document for my own students on the thesis research process, suggested timelines, and specific writing tips for the sections of the final paper:

https://github.com/dansmyers/HonorsThesisGuide