"Do I just e-mail one of the professors there, speak a little about myself, and just sort of say "I'm interested in becoming involved in the research you head"?"
Funny -- I actually wrote another essay called "How to Get Your Professors' Attention" on this subject. Some friends are reading it right now, and I wrote it in response to some of the things I've read on HN.
In any event, if you're trying to get in another lab, I'd try something like this:
1) Find the list of the profs and/or their websites.
2) Look at their research. You might not understand a lot of it, but try to get a sense of what they're doing.
3) Try to read some of their recent papers. You might not understand a lot of them, either, so look at the bibliographies: figure out if there are any seminal papers in the field that are cited that you might have a better shot at understanding. Alternately, try to look for a more accessible source of information on the topic. Profs at your own university might be good for that.
4) Then send them an e-mail saying, "I'm interested in subject X and read Y and Z. I've done A and B to learn more about this subject. Can I drop by your office hours to talk it over with you?"
Almost all profs will have office hours.
5) Part of your goal should be to signal that you're not going to waste the prof's time. One way you can do this is by showing that you've invested some amount of your own time. Profs quickly discover that most people who claim they want to learn don't and that most people who implicitly claim they won't waste their time will.
If you want to see a draft of the essay I mentioned, send me an e-mail.
Does it even matter? -- in line of what jseliger and pg said about choosing majors -- that it doesn't matter, because the more important skills are easily translatable into different fields.
Look for what interests you, and do that. What you major in does matter somewhat -- if you want to be an economist, I wouldn't recommend that you single major in art history, and if you want to be a psychologist, electrical engineering might be less useful than some other fields. But people say things like, "You'll be unemployable if you major in X," or "smart people only major in Y," and in those senses what you major in doesn't always matter.
When in doubt, build your reading/writing and math skills, since those are applicable to nearly everything.
Oh yeah -- also see pg's undergraduation: http://paulgraham.com/college.html , which is on point here. I think in some essay he points out that if you want to work in a lab, you need to convince the prof that you'll be a net decrease in work. This is harder than it might appear.
Emailing profs' grad students can also be a useful way of making contact, and especially a useful way of getting information about what the lab's like, what it does, if they're looking for more people, etc. It's the rare prof who'll write back more than a few sentences to a cold email from someone they don't recognize (unless it's someone important), but procrastinating grad students are often happy to give detailed answers to random inquiries.
Funny -- I actually wrote another essay called "How to Get Your Professors' Attention" on this subject. Some friends are reading it right now, and I wrote it in response to some of the things I've read on HN.
In any event, if you're trying to get in another lab, I'd try something like this:
1) Find the list of the profs and/or their websites.
2) Look at their research. You might not understand a lot of it, but try to get a sense of what they're doing.
3) Try to read some of their recent papers. You might not understand a lot of them, either, so look at the bibliographies: figure out if there are any seminal papers in the field that are cited that you might have a better shot at understanding. Alternately, try to look for a more accessible source of information on the topic. Profs at your own university might be good for that.
4) Then send them an e-mail saying, "I'm interested in subject X and read Y and Z. I've done A and B to learn more about this subject. Can I drop by your office hours to talk it over with you?"
Almost all profs will have office hours.
5) Part of your goal should be to signal that you're not going to waste the prof's time. One way you can do this is by showing that you've invested some amount of your own time. Profs quickly discover that most people who claim they want to learn don't and that most people who implicitly claim they won't waste their time will.
If you want to see a draft of the essay I mentioned, send me an e-mail.
Does it even matter? -- in line of what jseliger and pg said about choosing majors -- that it doesn't matter, because the more important skills are easily translatable into different fields.
Look for what interests you, and do that. What you major in does matter somewhat -- if you want to be an economist, I wouldn't recommend that you single major in art history, and if you want to be a psychologist, electrical engineering might be less useful than some other fields. But people say things like, "You'll be unemployable if you major in X," or "smart people only major in Y," and in those senses what you major in doesn't always matter.
When in doubt, build your reading/writing and math skills, since those are applicable to nearly everything.
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