How to join?

Undergraduate Students at Wellesley

If you’re interested in working with us, email Yaniv to ask about current research opportunities. Please include the answers to the questions below. This will help us find the right project for you. Please note that at the moment, we aren’t taking any non-Wellesley students.

Questions:

1. Topic: Having browsed this website, what topics are you most interested in?
2. Goals: What are you hoping to get out of a research experience (e.g. curious about trying something new, developing skills, career prospects, thesis, or anything else that comes to mind)?
3. Experience: Do you have any related experiences (e.g. coursework, internship, RA-ship, or anything else)?
4. Commitment: What’s your intended time commitment (e.g. how many hours per week for how many weeks, how many classes are you taking, do you have other research commitments)?
5. Catch-all: Anything else you want to share or that will be helpful for us to know?

Frequently Asked Questions

What are research opportunities for Wellesley College students?

There are a number of ways you can get involved in research at MOGU Lab:

• You can do an independent study with us (e.g. CS 250, CS 350)
• You can write a thesis with us
• You can work with us during the summer (and get paid)
  • We have funding to pay students a summer stipend.
  • There are also several wonderful opportunities to get a summer stipend through Wellesley / the Science Center. As an example, these include:
    • Clare Boothe Luce Program: for rising juniors from groups traditionally underrepresented in the Computational and Physical Sciences, looking for research mentorship and support during the summer before and throughout your junior year.
    • Science Center Summer Research Program: for all students who will be continuing their studies at Wellesley in the following academic year.

If you have any questions about which opportunity most makes sense for you, don’t hesitate to reach out!

What background do I need?

That depends on the project you’re most excited about! If you’re excited about digging into data from our clinical collaborators, it’s helpful to have taken an introductory machine learning / data science class. If you’re excited about developing new machine learning methods to address the specific issues found in our clinical data, it’s helpful to have taken a more advanced machine learning, statistics and/or math classes. If you’re excited about research questions about how models will be used by clinicians/patients in context, it’s helpful to have taken a human-computer interaction class.

Why do research?

There are many reasons to do research, including:

1. Personal fulfillment, development, and enjoyment: Research can be fun and enriching. It’s a great way to find immediate use and meaning for things you learned in the classroom, and to dive deeper.
2. Career prospects: The skills you gain from research – like understanding scientific literature, making and evaluating scientific hypotheses, breaking big and complicated questions into small digestible ones, etc. – are generalizable. They will serve you well no matter what path you take after.
3. Responsible citizenship: Research teaches you ways in which to question and challenge what already exists.

What’s it like doing research at MOGU Lab?

We recommend reaching out to current students to learn more about their projects and their experiences!

How do I pick the “right” research project?

When picking a research project, it’s easy to find ourselves either with a problem that’s too difficult to solve, or one whose solution is (nearly) immediately clear (in which case, it may not be regarded as a contribution to “generalizable knowledge”). To find a problem that’s “just right,” it takes a lot of practice and experience. We will therefore help you find a project that matches both your background and your interests.

Am I “good enough” to do research?

Yes, you are good enough. If you don’t think so, come talk to us and we’ll prove you wrong! In contrast to popular thought, research is not about having “genius ideas” and “breakthroughs.” Research is a slow, iterative, collaborative process in which we break big problems into smaller, more digestible problems. It’s about casting these problems into a lens that favors what you enjoy doing and what you feel like you are good at. If you can embrace this iterative process (with help from your mentors and peers, of course), you are certainly good enough to do research.

I’m not sure I love computer science, should I still do research?

Oftentimes, research questions transcend the boundaries of any specific field. And even within a single field, different subfields have very different flavors. By thinking about what aspects of a research project you might enjoy, we can find a research project that’s appropriate for you. For example, you can ask yourself, how much of your research time do you want to: spend in front of a computer? use your hands? talk to people? write code? write prose? make visualizations? do math/stats? etc.