Student information and policies
Having interested and excited students in the lab makes our lab group fun, productive, and exciting. We have had many excellent undergraduates in the lab - many which have gone on to awesome jobs and great grad programs and succeeded in them! If you are an undergrad at USC, Benedict, Allen, or Midlands Tech (or, elsewhere and in Columbia for any reason!) and are interested in plants, insects, or ecology more general - do get in touch!
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This page is to lay out the lab policies/expectations for undergraduate students.
Goals:
We seek to give undergraduates a welcoming, supportive, and intellectually challenging lab to foster development of technical skills, scientific writing and analysis, as well as critical thinking.
While many undergraduates have been coauthors or primary authors on papers out of the lab, that is not the only goal, and while we will provide opportunities for students to write-up and present their research at conferences, we do not require students to do so.
General policies
As a student, your primary responsibility is your classes - your lab work is a supplementary experience and should not get in the way of your classwork.
To this end, we generally ask students to volunteer for no more than 4 hours/week for their first semester or two. This period allows us to foster your development of skills and our assessment of your fit in the lab, as well as your assessment of whether the lab fits your interests.
After that, we encourage interested students to pursue their own projects, along with increasing their time in the lab, with or without research credits and we encourage, and support, students seeking research funding through the Office of Undergraduate Research, the Honor's College, or other sources.
In rare cases, we have grant funding for specific purposes and will hire undergraduates for those specific projects.