Introduction to Engineering Research - Wendy C. Crone Synthesis Lectures on Engineering, Science, and Technology

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the advisor give a lot of supervision or are students expected to work more independently?

      How is one’s thesis topic determined?

      How is authorship handled on journal publications?

      Will the research require traveling or working remotely?

      How long does it usually take for the advisor’s students to graduate?

      Are there opportunities available to attend a conference or two each year?

      Where have previous students gotten jobs?

      Different programs will handle graduate applications differently. However, there is likely a committee that determines an applicant’s overall fit for the program and selects the best applicants for broader circulation among the faculty members in the graduate program. For large programs and Master’s programs that do not have funding associated with them, it is more likely to be a decision made at the committee level. For a Ph.D. program there is more match-making required because you will need to have an interest in the research taking place in a faculty members lab and they will need to have funding to support you as a research assistantship.

      In many graduate programs there needs to be at least one faculty member who is interested in taking you on as an advisee in order for your application to progress. There are always exceptions though. Some programs have fellowship and teaching assistantship support that allows them to bring in more students without the promise of a research assistantship. And, students who have received a large external fellowship have more flexibility because they can often work with the faculty member of their choice without as much concern over the availability of funding for the research. I’ll note, however, that the fellowships do not generally cover research expenses, so even a fully supported fellow is not “free” for the faculty research mentor. They will need to have the necessary funds to cover the expenses of the research and the time to provide research mentoring.

       Getting Paid to Learn

      Unlike some other disciplines, engineers are frequently given the opportunity to earn a stipend while doing research that will directly benefit their own degree progress. When I occasionally hear it taken for granted and expected that their education should be completely paid for, I shake my head in wonder at the entitled attitude of this individual. Having served in graduate school administration, I am able to state definitively that in many other fields of study graduate students must fund their education by working positions that have no bearing on their research progress and their work may not even be connected to their disciplinary expertise. In fact, having to pay for one’s education in such away usually extends time to graduation dramatically.

      As noted above, at some institutions your acceptance into the graduate program may be separate from an offer of assistantship funding. Be certain to understand the details of your particular situation before accepting an offer.

      Students often come with misconceptions about where and how research funding is obtained. What students rarely appreciate is that research funding is very difficult to obtain. In most cases the funding for research (including a research assistantship) was obtained through a hard-fought and competitive proposal process. It is likely that their research mentor has spent an enormous amount of time and intellectual energy writing multiple proposals, of which only a subset is actually funded. The vast majority of research proposals that are written and submitted for consideration are rejected without being funded. Therefore, being supported on a research assistantship funded by a research grant is a privilege not an entitlement.

       Student Perspective

      “The thing I found most surprising about how research is conducted is the method by which most funding is procured and the overall attitude of researchers toward that source. When I first started learning about academic research, I expected budgets from research institutions to pay a large percentage of research costs. I believed that these budgets were heavily subsidized by student tuition and the earnings from previous research achievements at those institutions. This is not typically the case. Grants from the federal government are the single largest source of funding for the majority of universities and fields. Whether the funding is from a government agency such as NASA or the DOE, or from the Department of Defense, the money still comes from the American tax payer.”

      Grant funding may come from a federal source (such as the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health) or a private foundation (such as the American Heart Association or the Petroleum Research Fund). Research contracts are also a common funding source as well, and commonly come from federal sources (such as the Air Force Office of Scientific Research) or a private company (both small and large). Depending both on the source of the funding and the specific type of funding there may be very well-defined timelines and deliverables associated with the research. Some funding may require monthly, quarterly, annually, and/or final reporting associated with the project progress and outcomes. In other words, research funding comes with strings attached.

      Given the overall framework of funding, I suggest to graduate students that they should treat their assistantship as professional employment. If you have an assistantship, you are being paid for your engineering skills through both the stipend (i.e., paycheck) and tuition (i.e., waiver of tuition). If you were working in industry, you would be expected to treat the job professionally, put in your best effort, and achieve regular progress. The same is expected in your graduate research.

      For graduate students in engineering, and particularly students pursuing a Ph.D. program, graduate school is usually paid for by a fellowship, a research assistantship, or a teaching assistantship.

       Student Perspective

      “I believed that you still had to spend lots of money to attend grad school. I am extremely pleased to know that through applying for fellowships and with how most engineering departments work, pretty much everything from living expenses to tuition and lab funding is potentially covered.”

      Fellowships come in many shapes and sizes. Some universities have fellowships to provide and others are available through external programs. A fellowship may provide a “full ride” that pays for all of your tuition and stipend expenses (for one or more years), or it may simply be a supplement to other types of assistantship funding. A full fellowship gives you a huge advantage because a potential research mentor does not need to find as much funding to support you. No graduate student is truly “free” because the research mentor must have the time to interact with you and be able to support other research expenses especially for experimental work, but it is much easier for a research mentor to take on a fellowship student than to find funding for an assistantship.

      Fellowships provided by a university are usually ones that you are automatically considered for when you apply to the graduate program. The best way to ensure that you have a good chance at being considered for one of these is to have the best graduate school application possible and to submit it early. Do not wait until the deadline!! Many fellowship and assistantship opportunities will already be gone if your application is in the last batch of applicants to be considered.

      There are also a variety of fellowships that you can apply for yourself as a senior undergraduate or a first-year graduate student. Your academic advisor or research mentor will be able to point you toward ones that might be a good fit for you, but you should consider looking into some of the following:

      Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship

      Hertz Foundation’s Graduate Fellowship

      National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRF)

      National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program (NDSEG)

      National

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