Inkie
Member
Hi everyone. As a couple of you know, I have been battling late-stage Lyme disease for years and the last few months I've had to come home from college, and spend all of my time being very sick, stuck in my house. When I was at school, I had an exciting senior project in the works (it involved infecting Jerusalem crickets with a new species of parasitic hairworms recently discovered in the county). I was doing lab work for grad students, organizing the California Polytechnic State University insect collection, and doing a few side jobs for professors. Now that I'm home and can't do those things, I need to find something useful and productive to do to get me closer to my goal of becoming an entomologist/taxonomist and give me some more experience, without requiring me to leave the house because some days now I need a wheelchair to get around and barely have enough energy to get out of bed. I'm thinking that the perfect thing to do would be to perform some sort of experiment, type up the results in a scientific paper, and maybe get it published in some obscure journal somewhere. I have pretty extensive experience with experiments- I've written more scientific papers than I can count for classes (I'm a fourth year Animal Science major with a Biological Sciences minor) and I've helped a few grad students and professors with their experiments.
So I have some questions for anyone who would like to offer some tips or advice:
1>>Do journals require that you work under a professor if you are only an undergrad student?
2>>Do you have to have multiple authors or work with a group of people if you want to be published? Or, does it at least increase your chances of being accepted?
3>>Do you have any ideas at all of questions that my experiment could examine, or species I could work on? What's a question about cockroaches or spiders that you've always wondered but never found the answer to? At home I have a dissecting microscope, a dissection kit, a jewelry scale, lots of insect pins, hundreds of small deli cups with caps, a few 30 gallon rubber bins... I have a decent amount of supplies, but I also have access to my high school AP Biology classroom which has a limited amount of equipment, and I miiiiiiiiight be able to get access to someone's lab at UC Davis if I ask. I have plenty of various species of roaches, and a small colony of Phidippus audax so I was thinking about experimenting with one of those, or I could always buy a different species online.
4>>Does anyone know of any journals I may be able to publish a paper like this to? Obviously I'm not going to send my paper to Nature or Science or the Oxford Journals (lol), but I might be able to find a journal somewhere that will publish me.
5>>Anyone want to work a little with me on this? If you can help me come up with some good ideas and we can get a helpful dialogue going, perhaps we could both do the same experiment and compare results, perhaps combine them? Or, if you just want to help a little, I could just mention your name in my paper.
ANY other tips and advice is greatly appreciated. Questions, constructive criticism- throw it at me. This is still in the planning stage so I could use any and all help.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, have a great day everyone.
So I have some questions for anyone who would like to offer some tips or advice:
1>>Do journals require that you work under a professor if you are only an undergrad student?
2>>Do you have to have multiple authors or work with a group of people if you want to be published? Or, does it at least increase your chances of being accepted?
3>>Do you have any ideas at all of questions that my experiment could examine, or species I could work on? What's a question about cockroaches or spiders that you've always wondered but never found the answer to? At home I have a dissecting microscope, a dissection kit, a jewelry scale, lots of insect pins, hundreds of small deli cups with caps, a few 30 gallon rubber bins... I have a decent amount of supplies, but I also have access to my high school AP Biology classroom which has a limited amount of equipment, and I miiiiiiiiight be able to get access to someone's lab at UC Davis if I ask. I have plenty of various species of roaches, and a small colony of Phidippus audax so I was thinking about experimenting with one of those, or I could always buy a different species online.
4>>Does anyone know of any journals I may be able to publish a paper like this to? Obviously I'm not going to send my paper to Nature or Science or the Oxford Journals (lol), but I might be able to find a journal somewhere that will publish me.
5>>Anyone want to work a little with me on this? If you can help me come up with some good ideas and we can get a helpful dialogue going, perhaps we could both do the same experiment and compare results, perhaps combine them? Or, if you just want to help a little, I could just mention your name in my paper.
ANY other tips and advice is greatly appreciated. Questions, constructive criticism- throw it at me. This is still in the planning stage so I could use any and all help.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, have a great day everyone.