August 9, 2026

Like many fields, STEM has historically excluded many populations — and it continues to do so. It is worth noting, however, that the landscape has shifted significantly over the past several decades, driven by the work of scientists, educators, policymakers, and... click here to read more!

July 2, 2026

If you've looked at research lab websites or read through program descriptions, you've probably encountered the term "PI,” which is short for Principal Investigator. You can find PIs anywhere in research: they run labs, get named on grants, and appear at the top of academic department pages... click here to read more!

June 12, 2026

Did you know that there is a second, invisible curriculum that is not taught directly in schools? Specifically, this curriculum is a collection of unofficial or unspoken sets of rules that some students seem to already know while others stay in the dark. That unwritten rubric is... click here to read more!

June 2, 2026

If you've ever taken a basic science class, you've heard the term "control group." But in the context of real research, the control group is one of the most important design decisions in any experiment. In experimental design, understanding what controls are and why they’re necessary are... click here to read more!

May 21, 2026

In almost every movie involving a scene with a laboratory, mice are often squealing in the background. Even in scientific literature mice are showing up in studies covering all sorts of diseases. But why? Of course we wouldn’t want to use human beings as test subjects... click here to read more!

May 5, 2026

"It’s correlation, not causation!" You've probably heard this phrase before; it's practically a cliché at this point. But clichés become clichés because they're true, and this one is pretty critical for understanding how scientific evidence actually works. Misunderstanding the difference... click here to read more!

April 4, 2026

If you’ve already started looking into research programs or internships, then you’ve probably seen the terms “wet lab” and “dry lab.” What exactly does it mean, though, for a lab to be wet or dry? For someone who has never been in a laboratory setting before... click here to read more!

February 3, 2026

If you've ever heard a scientist say "this hasn't been peer-reviewed yet" or seen a news headline about a study "published in a peer-reviewed journal," you might have wondered what peer review actually is and why it seems to carry so much weight... click here to read more!

January 22, 2026

Scientific papers are not written for general audiences, but scientists in the same field, who share years of specialized vocabulary. For anyone, nevertheless a high school student reading one for the first time, the experience is pretty overwhelming. With anything, though... click here to read more!

December 2, 2025

You've probably seen the words “statistically significant” in newspaper headlines about scientific studies. "Scientists find statistically significant link between X and Y." While it sounds like concrete proof has been identified, “statistically significant” doesn’t truly mean... click here to read more!

November 4, 2025

If you've been accepted into a research program, mentorship opportunity, or are starting any kind of independent research project, there's a good chance someone will ask you to do a literature review at some point early in the process. For many students, this request lands with plenty of confusion... click here to read more!

October 21, 2025

If you've ever seen a research paper that involved human participants like a survey, a clinical trial, a psychological study, you may have noticed a line in the Methods section that says something like "this study was approved by the Institutional Review Board" or... click here to read more!

September 23, 2025

Over the past decade, a rather uncomfortable finding has emerged from across multiple scientific disciplines: a startling number of published research findings cannot be replicated. If you run the same study again with a different group of participants, you get different results... click here to read more!

August 12, 2025

In the popular imagination, the educational pathway in STEM is relatively linear: you go through high school, then college, attend graduate school, and finally start your career. The reality, however, is much less straight-forward. Gap years are periods of time... click here to read more!

July 1, 2025

Here's something most people outside of science don't know: a huge proportion of research that gets conducted never makes it into a published paper. Plenty of studies sit in file drawers, exist only as conference posters, or simply get abandoned halfway through. This phenomenon... click here to read more!

June 3, 2025

If you ask most people what a hypothesis is, you'll probably get something along the lines of: "an educated guess." While that is technically true, that answer only covers part of what a hypothesis actually does in real research. It's also worth clearing up... click here to read more!

May 27, 2025

Almost everyone has heard of independent and dependent variables, no matter the setting. But, given the similarity in orthography, many people tend to mess them up, despite repeated memorization. Something that helped me keep track is taking the terms literally... click here to read more!

April 22, 2025

You'll see all three of these behind researchers' names constantly once you start reading faculty bios or lab websites, and all of them were the product of very different training paths with different day-to-day routines. A PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) is a research-focused doctorate... click here to read more!

March 18, 2025

The word "conference" can sound intimidating. At first, they might seem like they are. Stepping into a room full of experts may seem daunting, but conferences are actually one of the more approachable parts of science culture. They’re also absolutely not off-limits to students... click here to read more!

March 4, 2025

A p-value is the probability of seeing results as extreme as yours (or more extreme) if there were actually no real effect at all. In other words, if the null hypothesis were true. It is not, despite extremely common misuse, the probability that your hypothesis is correct... click here to read more!

February 11, 2025

Every dollar spent in a research setting — lab supplies, equipment, staff salaries, and often stipends for student interns — tends to trace back to a grant. A grant starts with a PI writing a detailed proposal explaining exactly what they want to study, why it matters, and... click here to read more!

December 4, 2024

Most people think that papers are the only way that research gets published, but not all research actually shows up in the same form. Preprints, for one, are just as common, and is a paper a researcher posts publicly before (or during) the peer review process... click here to read more!

November 19, 2024

Basic research (sometimes called fundamental research) is driven purely by curiosity, expanding what we understand about how something works with no specific practical application in mind at the time. Studying exactly how a particular protein folds, just to understand the mechanism... click here to read more!

October 16, 2024

Animal studies are carefully regulated. The IRB oversees research involving human subjects, but for research using vertebrate animals, that oversight role belongs to a different body: the IACUC, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee... click here to read more!

September 3, 2024

If you land a spot in a research program, there's a good chance your day-to-day mentor won't be the professor who you emailed to get the position. Rather, it would be a postdoc. A postdoc (short for postdoctoral researcher) is someone who has already... click here to read more!

August 20, 2024

When people imagine "research," they usually picture numbers, a stereotype that aligns with quantitative research: anything measured numerically, like survey ratings, cell counts, reaction times, or growth rates over time. But a huge amount of rigorous science is qualitative... click here to read more!

July 8, 2024

A meta-analysis takes the idea of literature reviews a step further: instead of just discussing the studies side by side, it statistically combines their actual numerical results into one larger, more powerful analysis. This is more important than you might think... click here to read more!

June 10, 2024

You’ve definitely heard talk of “developing a resume,” or you’ve even started building one yourself! If that’s the case, then it’s likely that you’ve seen the term "CV" floating around too. While some people refer to the two interchangeably, they’re most certainly not the same document... click here to read more!

March 20, 2024

For many careers, but especially science, there’s an assumption that the "real" path into science involves strong high school grades, a four-year university straight out of high school, and a steady, linear march toward a research career without any detours. Contrary to popular belief... click here to read more!

February 24, 2024

What do you picture when you hear ‘scientist?’ You might imagine heaps of test tubes filled with mysterious, colorful liquids or a white lab coat. But what about the scientist themself? Most students, unfortunately, think of scientists as... click here to read more!