Finding Research Opportunities

Introduction¶

Finding your first research opportunity can feel like a chicken-and-egg problem.

You want research experience, but many research opportunities seem to prefer students who already have research experience. You want to develop scientific skills, but you may feel that you need to join a laboratory before you can learn those skills.

It is a little like searching for your first job or internship:

How am I supposed to get experience if I need experience to get experience?

There is no perfect solution to this problem. But there are ways to think strategically about it, and there are many things you can do to gradually make yourself a stronger scientist and a stronger candidate for future opportunities.

First, Acknowledge That This Takes Time¶

Before we talk about where to find research opportunities, we want to acknowledge something important: all of this takes time.

Reading scientific papers in the way we described in the previous section can take a lot of time. Learning programming, statistics, experimental techniques, or other new skills takes time. Developing enough background knowledge to understand a new research field takes time.

And you are probably doing all of this alongside other things.

You might be taking classes, studying for exams, working part-time, participating in extracurricular activities, or dealing with other responsibilities in your life.

On top of that, finding a research opportunity can itself take considerable time. You may need to search through university and laboratory websites, read about different researchers, read some of their papers, prepare applications, and reach out to many professors or research groups.

And after doing all of that, you may still get rejected or receive no response at all.

The difficulty can also vary enormously depending on where you are, what resources are available at your institution, and what kind of research you want to do.

Some universities may have many neuroscience laboratories and established programs for undergraduate research. Others may have relatively few. Certain types of research require expensive equipment, specialized facilities, access to patients, animal facilities, or particular expertise. Depending on your institution and location, there may therefore be different facilitators and barriers to getting involved in the research that interests you.

For some students, finding an opportunity may simply require more work.

We cannot remove all of these barriers. What we hope to provide in this guide is a way of thinking about the problem, some practical strategies, and hopefully some encouragement to keep moving forward while continuing to improve yourself as a scientist.

Treat the Process Itself as Part of Your Scientific Development¶

Regardless of what stage you are at, whether you are in high school, university, or have recently graduated, searching and applying for opportunities can itself help you refine your interests.

Perhaps you are looking through laboratories because you want to send emails to professors. You find a lab that sounds interesting, so you read about its research. That leads you to one of its papers. The paper introduces you to a technique you have never heard of, so you start learning about that technique. Then you discover another research question that interests you even more.

Or perhaps you are preparing an application for a summer internship, research program, scholarship, or research award. Writing the application forces you to explain what you are actually interested in and why.

You may not get that particular opportunity.

But the process has still made you read, think, and refine your interests.

This is another iterative process, much like the process of reading scientific papers that we described in the previous section.

You explore your interests. You read papers. You learn new skills. You apply for opportunities. You receive feedback, or sometimes rejection. You learn more. Your interests change. You become more experienced. Then you apply again.

Rejection is unfortunately a normal part of this process. It continues at essentially every stage of a scientific career. The important thing is to continue developing yourself rather than treating any single application or rejection as the final judgment on whether you can become a scientist.

You Can Also Create Your Own Opportunities¶

There is one point that we particularly want to emphasize.

Science, especially the natural sciences and neuroscience, is becoming increasingly data-driven. Advances in computing and artificial intelligence are accelerating this even further. Researchers are working with increasingly large and complex datasets, even in fields that are traditionally considered experimental.

You might eventually spend most of your time conducting experiments in a laboratory. But the data produced by those experiments still need to be organized, visualized, analyzed, interpreted, and communicated.

At the same time, the open science movement has made an enormous amount of scientific data, code, software, papers, educational material, and other resources publicly available.

We want every student to recognize what an important opportunity this creates.

You do not necessarily have to wait until someone gives you a position in a laboratory before you can begin learning how to do research hands-on.

You can learn Python or R. You can learn statistics and data visualization. You can download publicly available scientific datasets. You can reproduce analyses from papers. You can learn to use open-source scientific software. You can put your code on GitHub. And, as your skills develop, you can begin asking and investigating your own scientific questions using real data.

Connectome 2026–2027 itself is built around this idea. Brain datasets, from synapse-level connectomes to macroscale human neuroimaging datasets, give students opportunities to work with real neuroscience data without needing to own a microscope, operate an MRI scanner, maintain an animal facility, or already belong to a research laboratory.

These independent experiences do not completely replace being mentored by experienced scientists or working within a research group. As we discussed earlier, learning to become a scientist is partly an apprenticeship.

But open science gives you a way to start.

And importantly, it gives you a way to begin breaking the chicken-and-egg problem.

Instead of only saying:

“I am interested in neuroscience, but I don’t have any research experience.”

perhaps, over time, you can say:

“I became interested in this question, so I read about it. I learned the skills I needed to investigate it. I analyzed this open dataset, wrote the code, made these figures, and here is what I found.”

That does not guarantee you a position. But it gives you something concrete to talk about, something to show a potential mentor, and evidence that you have taken the initiative to learn.

These experiences can therefore do two things at once: help you become a better scientist and make you a more competitive candidate when you apply to research laboratories, internships, research programs, awards, scholarships, and eventually graduate school.

Making the Most of the Opportunities Available to You¶

In the following sections, we will give you some practical tips and strategies for finding and creating research opportunities, regardless of what stage you are at.

Some advice will apply broadly. Other suggestions will be more specific to where you are in your education—for example, whether you are in high school, an undergraduate, or a recent graduate.

We will also talk about how you can make the most of Connectome 2026–2027 itself. The competition is not only an opportunity to work with real neuroscience data, but also a chance to develop skills, create something you can show to future mentors or programs, and practice communicating your scientific work.

At the same time, we do not want you to think that research experience has to come from one particular program or laboratory.

As we discussed earlier, the growth of open science gives you access to datasets, software, code, papers, lectures, and other resources that you can use to keep learning and creating your own opportunities. These resources can complement formal research experiences and, for some students, may be the main way they are able to begin.

So, as you go through the following sections, think about how you can combine the opportunities that are available to you: formal research experiences, competitions such as Connectome 2026–2027, and your own independent learning and projects.

You do not need to have access to every opportunity.

The goal is to make the most of what you do have, while continually building the knowledge, skills, experience, and confidence that can help you take the next step.