Lassonde Undergraduate Research Award

Romina is one of three undergraduates working in the lab this summer. She, like Alex holds a Lassonde Undergraduate Research Award (LURA) while Michael holds an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA). These funding sources are key for getting top undergraduates involved in research early in their careers, giving them a taste for what a graduate degree or a life in research might be like.

by Romina Bahrami

This summer I had the great opportunity to participate in research in the Planetary Volatiles Lab as an undergraduate student who just finished their first year of university. Doing research as an undergraduate student seems stupid and meaningless to many people and I can’t deny the lack of knowledge and experience as an undergraduate comparing to a graduate student; but I believe letting us work besides graduate students can act as an accelerator for us. Most people, including myself, who enter the science majors especially physics and astrophysics, have the intention to become a researcher one day while they know nothing about a researcher’s job or lifestyle. 

The first day that I started my job, I had no idea about the process of academic research. Although we had learned about it at high school, reality was much different. What they taught me before this internship was like teaching someone how to swim on the land! The way I used to study for school, was reading the text books from the first page to the last page, following a regular algorithm. While for the research I had to look up into a database filled with thousands of academic papers with various subjects. I felt that I was drowning in the papers and topics. It took me a couple of weeks to get used to this studying style and finding the right track relating to my research topic. So many times, I spent a lot of time on the topics and papers that were irrelevant to my work and only resulted in gathering  unnecessary information. Knowing what you’re looking for, where to look, how to find it and how to categorize the information is a research skill which needs a lot of practice.

First, I started the research, my supervisor, professor John Moores, gave me a general idea about the topic, the general procedure and the main goal. My job was to study relevant topics from papers and learn basics about Mars. After that, I started looking into papers to find exact information needed for our research. Then, I had to plan the experimental part with all the details. After reaching a reasonable plan we started ordering the materials and the instruments. 

The practical part was a whole new challenge. (There is no need to mention the stuff that I broke in the lab during the work!). During the experiment I was confronted with many errors that I had not anticipated. Trying different methods to decrease these errors is a challenge itself. Some errors are because of the way that we run the experiments and some errors are because of the instruments. The best thing that we can do is to plan our steps in a way that minimizes the error; because there is not much we can do about the instruments and their accuracy. A common method to deal with inaccuracy and errors, is calculating the average. We run every single step of the experiment for several rounds and calculate the average result. 

After collecting data, we use some programs and codes to process our data and plot our graphs. Sometimes we need to compare our results with someone else’s results; in that case we should consider some details like the difference in measurements and units and remember to convert them. After that, we analyse our results to reach a conclusion or to extend the research.

That is my experience from Lassonde Undergraduate Research Award.  Thank professor John E. Moores and PVL members specially Dr. Paul J. Godin for teaching me a lot of stuffs. Now I have a better idea about research, planetary science, my future career and my options for graduate school.