How do students get into research labs?
Hello Everyone. I am biomed student who has wrapped up their 2nd year and will be entering their 3rd year this upcoming Fall 2026. I wanted to get involved in research and seek out the research opportunities available to me as an undergrad.
I reached out to some profs, not a lot though. About 4 profs whom I genuinely found their work to be interesting and would like to be apart of their lab. I told them about myself, my post-grad plan, why I am reaching out, what I found interesting about their specific lab, I even read their publications to get insight about their work and included a sentence or two regarding that in the email.
The reason why I only emailed 4 is because one of my friends, who is in a research lab warned me that profs can easily tell who is not actually interested. I didn't want to spam multiple profs whose labs don't make me confident about whether I would enjoy this research topic.
However, none of them responded. It's not the end of the world of course as it's expected that emailing 4 profs won't get you far as they are busy with their own stuff as well. However, now I'm wondering what else could I realistically do then?