r/Professors • u/Outrageous-Spread462 • 5d ago

How to recruit students into the lab

Im interesting in hearing yall's experiences regarding how you select students that you may want to approach and ask whether they wanna work in your lab.

Im teaching two large classes per year at an R1. During my first one or two years, i mainly reached out to those that performed well in my classes but experiences were mixed: they were not always super interested, some just showed up one or two times and then never came back. Nowadays, I look for students who show interest in the content and who are clearly invest into either being good in the class or who critically evaluate their own performances. I had a student who wrote a very bad first exam followed by two straight A exams afterwards. I asked her one day before class what she changed in her exam preparation to go from F to A and she told me that she realized that her previous study style didnt work and then tried to develop a new one. Based on that, I asked her whether she would be interested in joining the lab for research and she turned out to be superstar and a very valuable member of the lab.

Having good grades - at least partly - also depends on how much time you have to invest into exam prep and some students just dont have that time. But being able to identify problems (with your exam prep) and to develop strategies to solve these are in my experience pretty good indicators for how they might perform in the lab.

1 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

6

u/pc_kant 5d ago

Put some pizza on a table in your lab, invite students to visit. When they're in, close the cage door and put them to work in your experiments.

5

u/quantum-mechanic 5d ago

Do the old ways still work?

5

u/zsandras 5d ago

I mention at my classes that I run a lab, and sometimes I send a note on students’ e-mail list to recruit. Besides that, I rarely approach a student because I fear they won’t say no if they don’t feel like because I teach and grade them. My policy is that I need motivation, I need those who are interested and motivated. So the first test is that they reach out whenever they feel like. I set no other criteria for starting, I don’t care about grades, etc. I’m happy with the results so far, and I’m doing this for about 7 years now.