The thing nobody tells you about getting a research position 

This guest column is written through a partnership with the Black Students’ Association and The Gateway.

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The professors who will change your life are not always advertising themselves or their research projects. Finding the right fit is a lesson I had to learn by doing it wrong first. Thankfully, you don’t have to.

My earliest outreach emails were written for an audience of one: whoever I thought I needed to be to earn a yes. So, I talked about my passion, referenced my GPA, and said I was eager to contribute. To what, though? I hadn’t ever thought to ask.

But that question stopped mattering to me when I got the research position, because at least I made it in. In my mind, the hard part was over. What I didn’t understand then was that getting the position is not the goal. The goal is being in a room that can hold both your potential and the process it takes to get there.

Finding that room requires moving past the relief of being chosen and toward the responsibility of choosing well. So before you ask to join a lab, ask to understand how it works. Email a professor and let them know you’ve been reading their work and have some questions worth sitting down over. 

A bad fit may be too busy to consider you at all. Let them be. A good fit, however, will respond with the same professional courtesy they’d offer a colleague. They’ll talk about their work clearly and take your questions seriously, asking what you are curious about rather than just what you can do for them. 

The investigative phase should extend beyond the principal investigator (PI), too. Before you sign on, find a current student in the lab and ask them one question: what surprised you about working here?

This due diligence is vital because research involves a real power dynamic. Your PI controls your project scope, your reference letter, your authorship conversation, and your access to other opportunities. Under that weight, students become very good at talking themselves out of their own discomfort. They’ll say things like: maybe this is just how research works. Maybe I’m too sensitive. Maybe I should work harder and stop asking questions. It is normal to feel uncertain when you are new, but there is a difference between growing pains and a pattern that teaches you to distrust yourself.

Academia will humble you. It will ground you, strengthen you, and even the experiences that break something in you will build something greater in its place. Still, there is a difference between being challenged and being worn down, just as there is a thin line between a high bar and a heavy boot. While research is meant to be challenging, it should not make you feel small. Pay attention to how your PI responds when your only honest answer is, “I don’t know.”

From the beginning, treat clarity as part of the work itself. Keep meeting notes, log your hours, record expectations as they are discussed, and track the time you spend on work that often goes unseen (yes, even literature reviews). This protects you in ways you won’t fully appreciate until you need it. By making your process visible and your contributions tangible, you develop an intimate understanding of where your time goes, what the work demands, and perhaps where your limits begin to blur.

Clarity is protective. It helps you understand what you are giving to a place, not just what you hope to gain from it. That awareness is what protects the passion that brought you there in the first place. What you are really protecting, underneath all of it, is the ability to see a situation clearly enough to know whether it deserves more of you.

As a researcher, you owe the work a genuine interest. You owe it disciplined, consistent effort. You owe it to yourself to let your failures inform your progress. But you do not owe it to your sense of self. No project, no reference letter, no line on a CV is worth shrinking just to survive the process of becoming.

The best research experiences I’ve heard about, and the one I eventually found, had one thing in common: the PI remembered what it’s like to stand exactly where you are. That is the thing no one tells you. Find the one who remembers.

Moriah Inyang-Otu is an undergraduate student and the vice-president (academic) for the Black Students’ Association at the University of Alberta.