The short answer is yes - and especially if you are planning on applying
for post-graduate programs. For graduate school, obtaining research
experience is invaluable for several reasons:
1. It will give you a taste of what a graduate research degree will be
like.
2. It will provide you with the opportunity to work with graduate
students and scientists working in the filed you plan to enter.
3. It will get you some excellent letters of recommendation and a
leg-up when it comes to admission to your top programs.
In an ideal world we would pay all of the students working in our labs,
but that is never possible. Plus you should know that people often use
volunteer positions to get a look at job or graduate candidates - that
volunteer position may turn into a paid position at some point. I think
my lab is like many where the undergraduates are full partners in
research; they conduct independent projects and often become authors on
the papers we publish.
The short answer is that volunteering may be the most important thing
you can do to advance your career.
Mitch Cruzan
On 4/8/2014 11:55 AM, John A. wrote:
There are a lot of unpaid positions being advertised here lately. Leaving
aside the issue of personal fulfilment and so forth, I'd like to know if
volunteer positions actually make a difference to HR managers or hiring
committees.
When I was in high school, I was strongly encouraged to volunteer by my
guidance counselor, so I served as a volunteer for several years with a local
museum, and later with a community NGO. I was given to understand this was
useful for college applications and for the résumé in general. That habit
stayed with me, and I volunteered off and on throughout college and beyond.
By the time I was applying to jobs out of grad school, my advisor told me
to not even bother listing the volunteer positions--that no one in academia
could care less, and presumably no one in major NGOs or the corporate
environment would either.
So the question is, does volunteering really offer any advantages to
anyone past the high school stage? If so, what are they?
And if not, who ends up filling these positions, and why?
- J. A.
