The most crucial thing for an undergraduate student keen on graduate school is volunteering in a psychology lab.

The ideal volunteer shows initiative in their lab.
The goal is to stand out, not be a forgettable research assistant (RA).

Contacting a professor

The head of most labs is a professor, also called a principal investigator (PI).

When emailing a PI:

1. Be specific. Read one or more of their papers and at least mention something from their lab website. Short is good, but include some person-specific content, not just a "form letter".
2. Don't write boring general statements. "Psych is my passion" is well and good for you, but that is boring to a PI. Any undergraduate could say that! Why are you emailing this PI? Why do you want to work in their specific lab?
3. Offer something. More on this below.
4. Be ready to not get responses and to not get in. You have not been personally rejected. PIs get a lot of emails! Sometimes, there is simply no need for new RAs because the lab is full. Our lab gets RA applications all the time, but there are only so many projects running at any time.

Most people email a prof with what amounts to, "I want to work for you because it would help me."
Imagine the professor's perspective: Help you? Why do I care? How are you going to help me? If you've presented a poster, what good does that do me? Do you have some skill I can use? Training you is a resource burden for me, so you've got to give me a reason to want you over everyone else. Granted, I do need a few bodies to run experiments, but if all you offer is a body, your applications goes in the pile with everyone else that's just a body.

Okay, most PIs are not as mercenary as the picture I've painted. Many professors want to help you from the bottom of their altruistic hearts. However, most professors are very busy so they don't want to spend time on poorly written emails. Follow my advice to make your contact email stand out.

Every new RA is an investment: it costs time and attention to train a new RA.
Show that you are a promising and worthwhile investment by telling me what you can do for me (not just what I can do for you). The more useful or rare the skill, the better.

What can you do? Do you have any skills?

You're not expected to be an expert.

Everyone needs a first chance.
Experience is a classic Catch-22: you need experience to get the job, but you need the job to get experience! While the exact skills you have might not be useful to this PI, showing that you have some skills shows the PI that you have learned more than the bare minimum of what your degree taught you. That shoes initiative and sets you apart from the pile.

For example, if you want to work in an EEG lab and you've worked with EEG before, that would be perfect. Most of us don't have the "perfect" fit, though, especially when we're just starting out. Even so, try to provide some evidence of something of value. Maybe you learn quickly or have other technical skills that demonstrate that you could learn similarly complex methods, like those needed for EEG. If you don't feel like you have any skills at all, maybe take a free online course to learn R basics; this would develop a notable skill and would show initiative.

Don't claim to have skills you don't have.

If you have previous RA experience on your CV, what did you learn?
Your email could say,

Your email should be short, but if you've done stuff, don't make the PI dig through your CV to find it. Summarize the highlights and focus your highlights on what you think would help the PI the most.

Lab experience in the domain you're most interested in (and learning/applying those skills) is best; lab experience in adjacent domains or learning/applying relevant skills is good. Try to find a way to tie it together, e.g. learning R or Python is useful whether you're in a cognitive lab or a social lab.

Skills you main gain from volunteering

Many skills are trained and/or tested by volunteering in a lab.

• time-management skills
• organizational and administrative skills
• (potentially) research design skills
• (potentially) research-related programming and/or analysis skills
• (potentially) mentorship/leadership skills (if you oversee others)

For example, under my guidance, my research assistants can get promoted to senior research assistants that learn to train and oversee junior research assistants. Some of my RAs have learned to program in R and Python. Some have learned to write grant applications and won grants under my guidance. These are all very valuable skills in grad school.

How long should you stay?

It depends on why you are volunteering.

You want to go to graduate school?

Volunteer until you graduate. Make connections. Try to get "promoted" to senior research assistant positions. Show initiative and take on more responsibility. Consider proposing your own research. Ask the people you work with what it would take for you to earn authorship on a paper that could get published. Learn all you can, especially from the grad students in the lab!

You are doing a course or independent research project?

Finish the project and leave, I guess.

You are not interested in academia?

Why are you volunteering? Figure out what you want to do after you graduate, then figure out what will serve that career and do that instead! Your most valuable option may not be volunteering if you're not doing it for a project or for grad school. While volunteering can provide some experience for industry work, you might be better off trying to find work-placement programs that link you up with industry positions while you are still in school. These sorts of programs often pay, too, which volunteering in a lab rarely does.

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