First, I want to thank everyone for giving me the time and space over the summer to catch a break, rest and recoup. I appreciate all the kind comments, messages, emails and check ins. 

When I got my assistantship offer for my Masters in 2021, one of my greatest worries was how I would get into research as this was a prerequisite for maintaining my funding. I was moving to a whole new country, with a different educational system, in a new research area, plus I had worked in the industry for 3 years at this point without doing major research during that period; and it was important for me to get started on my research as soon as I landed. I definitely wished I had a starter pack to go through or a guide of some way on how to get started in research as a new international graduate student in the US.

While I didn’t get to have that, I have put together this article to serve as that for you. 

Here are some tips I wish someone had shared with me then. Consider this a basic starter pack to get you right into the flow of things as soon as you land.

  1. Choose a research area: If you haven’t chosen a research area yet, this is the first step to get started in research. You can do this by spending time researching the Internet, asking questions to people in your field, reading research papers and articles, listening to talks and presentations, staying genuinely curious, and taking notes of things that pique your interest or questions you’d like to seek answers to.

    The goal of research is to find answers to unanswered questions, improve current solutions, develop alternate methods, and just explore the unknown. You don’t necessarily have to narrow down on a specific research area to the ‘T’ before you begin, but it helps to have one or two areas you know you’re interested in – as it is a factor that could influence some decisions, such as choosing which courses to take, what lab to apply to, or which faculty to reach out to. And oh, it’s okay to change / switch your research area as you get to know more.
  2. Choose a research advisor: Now that you have decided on the area(s) you want to focus on for your research, you need to find a research professor in your school / department to advise you. Professors typically have labs, with multiple research students they’re advising, working on different projects in the same research area; and these labs usually have websites. On the website, you can typically see the different research areas of the lab, most recent publications by lab members, open research problems, profiles of the current lab members in case you want to reach out to any with questions, recruitment information, and how to apply to join the lab. You can also check for recent publications of the Professor on their Google Scholar profile. This provides clarity on the direction of their recent research and funding. Being specific about the research area from their recent publications could also pique the Professor’s interest and also help you highlight your skills that are closely related to the methodologies in their recent research. Another way people typically choose research advisors is by either cold emailing the Professor directly or indicating interest directly if you take any of their courses. Some things to consider when choosing a research advisor could be their research area, prior research experience, network and reputation in the field, lab size, available funding, coursework requirements, and even their advising style (micromanaging, less hands-on, hands-on but not micromanaging, less creative/technical freedom, etc.)
  3. Discover research topics: Following from the advising style mentioned above, the process for picking research topics depends on your advisor / lab and your research experience / level; but a great next step for you is to work to come up with possible research topics and research questions you would like to answer. This is a more narrowed-down process from the step of choosing a research area. For example, let’s say your desired research area is in self-driving robots. That is quite broad. Your research topic will focus more on what you intend to accomplish with self-driving robots. It could be that you’re interested in reducing wear and tear of self-driving robots, or improving navigation in unstructured environments, or improving alerting on self-driving robots, or even self-repair of the robots.

    There are a lot of possible research topics under that one research area and the one you finally decide to go with might be based on already-available preliminary research, or data available, timelines, funding scope, your advisor’s interests and your personal interests, your technical skills, resourcing, etc. It’s also okay to change this if you start working on it and you realize it’s not feasible, and while this is not the ideal case, it does happen a lot and is a part of the research process, especially earlier on in one’s research career.
  4. Deploy tools to aid success: Setup yourself for success by using resources around you and utilizing tools to make you a more efficient and optimal researcher. These tools might look different for different fields, but I’ll be sharing 10 generic areas and the tools that helped me during my research.
    1. Writing papers: Writing papers and academic articles is a big part of research. I used Overleaf for all my writing during grad school. It was easy to learn, convenient, collaborative, adaptable, and I loved that. In undergrad, I had used Microsoft Word to write up my project, but formatting complex math equations and managing citations was a pain. This is something I didn’t experience with Overleaf. Another good thing about Overleaf is that there are templates created by different organizations that automate the formatting for you based on the set stylesheet, taking one thing off your plate to worry about. Overleaf also lets you export your file in different formats, either as a collaborative Overleaf project, or a LaTex file, PDF, image, etc.
      One thing to be careful of while writing is plagiarism. Deliberate or indeliberate plagiarism is heavily penalized in the US and can even lead to expulsion, so be very careful of this.
    2. Reading papers: There’s an art to reading papers and this is a skill you need to learn based on what works for you. You want to not spend too much time reading every paper, but you want to skim through each paper to discover the relevant ones or not; and when you find the relevant ones, you want to highlight the main points and not forget them. This was a learning curve for me, but a tool that helped me is Notability. It’s an app I downloaded on my iPad that allows for grouping papers in folders based on the area that stood out for me, easily highlighting/annotating on the paper and has a good search mechanism. Another helpful resource for reading papers in grad school is taking advantage of your institution library and login resources to access paywalled journal papers and publications. This was also very helpful to me. 
    3. Citations and referencing: As you read more papers and start your writing, you need a way to store your relevant references and access them as needed. I personally used Overleaf for this by maintaining a running .bib file where I dumped all my relevant citations. Other popular solutions include Zotero and Mendeley, although I didn’t use these personally, which people also integrate into Microsoft Word. There are online resources like this which could guide you on how to get this done. 
    4. Timelines and scheduling: One thing about research is there are going to be a lot of important dates and deadlines you don’t want to miss, as well as set timelines you don’t want to fall behind. For this, you need a tool to properly manage your schedule, timelines and due dates. I personally used Excel for this – building a checklist of items, their deadlines, and also breaking these items into smaller plans with corresponding dates for each mini-milestone. 
    5. Data backup and storage: Losing your data or files is one of the worst things that can happen to any researcher. While it is extremely important to document everything, it is equally important to make sure you store all information in a secure and reliable place, with adequate backup. For data storage and backup, I used Git for my code, making sure to commit after every day’s work, and then I put large files on OneDrive with timestamps and linked them in a backed up document as well for easy reference and retrieval. 
    6. Grammar check: Using tools like ChatGPT or Grammarly can help in spell-check, making text concise to meet word count and ensuring correct grammar overall as you’re writing your papers and preparing presentations. Be careful of using any unverified online tool for this kind of check as it might store your details in its database and count as plagiarism if your work is checked.
    7. Presentations: Speaking of presentations, I used Microsoft PowerPoint to create my slides. I had to learn to make visual slides, as opposed to text-heavy slides, and decrease my Turn-Around Time (TAT) because sometimes you might have less than 24 hours to get your slides ready for a presentation. This gets better with practice so I’d advise that you always jump on any opportunity to present, as you get better by doing so, and take feedback to improve. There are also YouTube videos that could help build this skill and you could also consider doing mock presentations with friends, colleagues, or mentors, to also get better. 
    8. Figures: In addition to using Microsoft PowerPoint for creating my presentations, I also find it to be a great tool to create figures for research papers. As a researcher, it is important to be able to create figures that communicate the message effectively, managing space optimally, without much clutter and no confusion. I don’t think of myself as the most creative person, so this is an easy way out for me to get it done and have it look good. Some people also use Canva or other graphic editing software, so you could also explore those if they work better for you. 
    9. Google alerts: You can set up Google alerts to track any mention on the Internet (via Google indexing) for either your name, the name of a certain researcher you’re interested in keeping up with, certain keywords or phrases in your research area. This helps keep you updated automatically without having to devote a lot of time to manually searching for new information. 
    10. Google scholar: Finally, in academic writing, you can’t use blog posts, websites, articles, and sometimes even non-peer-reviewed articles as references. To find scholarly articles for your literature review or referencing, you can either search directly on Google Scholar or search on any search engine with the “scholar” suffix in the search query. This helps filter out non-scholarly articles, although you’d need to confirm that they were peer-reviewed if that’s a requirement for the paper you’re writing. 
  5. Stay organized but be flexible: As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in research. Keeping up with published papers in your research area, conversations and communications with your advisor and collaborators via different media, submission deadlines, timelines, progress updates, etc. It is important to manage your time and capacity very well and organize all this information carefully to avoid any slip-ups. Use the different tools available (some mentioned above) to keep you organized, document everything and check in every week to make sure you’re not missing anything totally. Here are some things I did to stay organized. I maintained
    1. an Excel Sheet of paper deadlines/dates. 
    2. a summary document for different papers for your literature review that outlines that paper title, authors and institution, problem statement, main methodology, results, what you learned, what you can add/improve/build upon from this paper, when and where it was published, and a link to the paper. 
    3. a folder with time stamped evidence and updates, this helped me keep track of all my results, benchmarks, data collected and updated with timestamps to avoid misunderstandings, miscommunications, or confusion.
    4. an Excel Sheet with all my deliverables, assignments, and deadlines for my coursework so I don’t fall behind on that as well.

However, it goes to say that research is not linear. Things don’t always work out as expected or as estimated, timelines change, and obstacles pop up. One thing to remember through it all is to stay flexible, protect your personal joy and happiness, and adapt as best as you can to different stumbles along the way. 

  1. Prioritize your health: Finally, as a bonus tip, please prioritize your physical, mental, emotional, and psychological health throughout the process. Research is a marathon, not a sprint, and you want to pace yourself accordingly and keep yourself together to get to the finish line. Use anti-reflective glasses if you spend long hours looking at a digital screen, stand while working and reduce sedentary/seated hours, eat healthy, drink water, sleep well, move your body and stay physically active, spend scheduled time with loved ones as frequently as you can, indulge in your personal hobbies once in a while, wear protective apparel if working physically in a dangerous/sensitive environment, take breaks, reward yourself for little milestones, and listen to success stories of people that have gone ahead of you. It helps keep you encouraged, recharged, and motivated. Doing research is a huge investment and I hope it pays off for you.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shared 6 tips that helped me get started as a research grad student in the US, as well as some tools that helped me succeed in that new phase. I hope this is helpful to you. 

Please do drop a comment, ask any questions, and share this with anyone you know that just started a research grad school program, or is getting into research work. I would really appreciate that. Also, feel free to shoot me an email at: contactaniekan at gmail dot com with any suggestions or topic ideas you’d like me to cover in the future.

Again, I really appreciate all of you, my audience, for continually reading, sharing, engaging with my articles and also reaching out to me from time to time. 

I’m grateful.

Thank you for reading,

Aniekan