Prospective Students

Undergraduates

Undergraduate research can be a great experience. We have students who have joined the lab for a summer project with the help of the Errickson Discovery Grant or SEN Grant. However, the most common scenario is students emailing or catching me after class to ask about working on a project in the lab. I do my best to respond quickly, but do not be afraid to email me again in case your first one got lost on a particularly busy day. I try to pair undergraduates with a graduate student mentor, so you should also feel free to email the graduate students who are working on projects that particularly interest you.

Graduate Students

First, thank you for your interest! We receive hundreds of emails every fall from students we have never met interested in joining the group. They typically include information about the student's current institution, class ranking, GPA, etc. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the time to review and respond to each individual, so the vast majority will go unread. After you have been accepted, please e-mail me and say you have been accepted! We will read these and do our best to respond before the recruitment event in February.

Admissions at Penn State

Individual faculty do not make admissions decisions, and the process at Penn State is set up so that faculty do not have individual influence over who is admitted. There are a selected number of faculty who review applications for all admissions based on the number of total open Research Assistant and Teaching Assitant positions - usually about 40 to 60 per year - reported by the faculty. Admissions are made accordingly. In February or March, Penn State hosts a recruitment event where the faculty actually compete to hire out of the admitted student pool.

Thus, the most difficult part of the process is to have a distinguished application such that you can be admitted. For domestic students and students at Penn State, this usually means that you are within the top 10 to 20% of students by GPA and at the same time are active in research (as demonstrated by publications) and/or activities (internships, student leadership positions, etc.). For international students, this means typically that you have research experience and are at the top of your class.

Funding

Nearly all admitted student have full funding based on the TA and RA positions that we know of during the admissions process. Our department almost always guaruntees some sort of funding for the first year, usually through a TA. This gives you plenty of time to meet faculty and get to know them personally by attending lab meetings and talking to their current students. We also try to setup mini-projects so that students can become familiar with the work, and really decide if it is something they want to continue for the next ~5years.