Undergraduate
opportunities:
We regularly have
Indiana University undergraduates participate in independent research,
as well as work as research assistants on long-term projects initiated
by our graduate students or by Drs. West and King.
During the summer
months, we will frequently offer summer support to outstanding
undergraduates from other schools that are looking for a research
experience in animal behavior. We are especially interested in students
from small colleges that have not had the opportunity to work in a lab
at a research university.
If you are
interested, please send an email to
apking@indiana.edu with a copy enclosed to
mewest@indiana.edu explaining why you are interested in the lab. We
also need to know something about you. At a minimum, we need to know
what year you are in, if you have had any prior research experience and
your major. We also would want to know whether you are planning to
attend graduate school and in what field.
Prospective
graduate students:
The first step is
to study this web site carefully. It would be especially useful to
investigate the bird research page of this web site. That page along
with the related pages offers a great deal of information about the
history and current research at the Animal Behavior Farm. It would also
be helpful to read some of the recent publications. After making the
effort to study the website, please send an email to
apking@indiana.edu with a copy enclosed to
mewest@indiana.edu explaining why you are interested in the lab and
ask some questions about our research or any
other aspect of the Animal Behavior Farm. In that email, it
is helpful to us if you could tell us about your prior research
experiences. As the first step in the process of determining whether the
farm offers an appropriate training opportunity for a prospective
graduate student, we need to have a substantive email dialog in order to
learn about one another. If this dialog is productive, it may lead to
our asking you to visit the lab at our expense in order to further
explore the possibilities at IU.
We would also
encourage you to look at the recent graduate section of the
people page as several of our students are
looking for graduate students. While our students’ research is different
from ours, the training opportunities are all excellent and conceptually
complimentary to our theoretical approach to the study of animal
behavior. We believe that the Animal Behavior Farm is not the best
choice for all, and that the opportunities offered by our students will,
for some students, be a superior alternative.
