[dansmyers]

I'm a professor at an undergraduate college. I've supervised honors thesis projects and published papers and posters with students. You've got two main options for doing research as an undergrad:

1. Join an existing research group as an assistant. This is more likely at a big university that emphasizes scholarship and publications. If you take this route, you'll probably have a small part of a larger project and your direct supervisor might be a postdoc or grad student.

2. Work on a complete project, either as an independent study or as an honors-level thesis. This is more common at an undergrad college like mine.

The advantage of (1) is that you'll be exposed to a higher level of research and get a better feel for what grad school is like. The advantage of (2) is that you get to take on the entire research project, including the lit review and writing.

In either case, the professor's research focus will play a big role in the topic of the project. The best advisor is one that you have a good relationship with and who has experience incorporating undergrads into their work. Prioritize that more so than the specific research topic. Think carefully about the scope of the project; a focused project within the supervisor's area of expertise is more likely to succeed. Trying to make up your own topic is probably a bad idea.

I have a few practical tips from previous thesis projects I've supervised:

- If you're doing a senior project, remember that you only have ~8 months, which has to include all the pre-research and writing. You need to be making progress every week. If you get stuck, seek help so you can get unstuck as quickly as possible.

- Schedule time for your research every day like a class. That time is blocked off and you WILL NOT schedule anything else during it. Work in brief, regular sessions. Don't binge.

- Keep backups of all your work, notes, and drafts.

- You may have to do a lit review, but don't get bogged down on it. I frequently see issues with students who try to read "every" paper and lose time that would be better spent on their actual research. You should have 2-3 key papers (ideally identified by your professor) that you work through in detail. You may add other papers, but focus your reading on quickly extracting key points and the context of the paper -- this is an important research skill to develop early. Set an aggressive limit on the size and scope of the lit review so you can finish it and move on to other topics.

- Be careful about projects that require hardware or complex system setups. You can easily lose a lot of time trying to get things to work.

- You might be able to publish something, but don't get hung up on that as an outcome. Posters are a great result for an undergrad project.

- The research question is the driver of the project. Make sure you clearly understand what you want to learn and how the design of your experiments/analysis relates to its answer. Some students fall into the trap of doing "research" that's more of a summary of an area, rather than an original investigation. Again, start with a narrow, carefully-scoped question; you can always broaden the scope if you have time.

I wrote a document for my own students on the thesis research process, suggested timelines, and specific writing tips for the sections of the final paper:

https://github.com/dansmyers/HonorsThesisGuide

[ad34bacf35a2]

I appreciate it, this is kind of what I was thinking as well, option one you mentioned might not be available for me, at least from approaching faculty members in my college, so the most likely approach I'm taking is the second one.

With that I was wondering, how do I know if I have a novel idea (other than searching common computer science conferences and papers for researchers who may have done it), what can I do to be sure.

[dansmyers]

I wouldn't worry too much about coming up with a "novel" idea on your own. Your advisor should help you select and refine a topic. That's a major part of their role.

Published research is more like a conversation among its participants. There's a stream of thought and continuity that connects each paper to its predecessors. Ideas come out of engaging with the conversation and thinking about new directions and open questions. One of my advisors used to talk about "research taste" -- the process of learning what good research looks like and how to choose topics, which develops over time through exposure to the field.

I'd encourage you, at this stage, to just focus on defining your interests. If you're interested in bluetooth security, for example, why is that? What do you find engaging about that topic? Then you can build from there: who's written about that and what results have they produced? Are there good survey papers about the current state of the art? What are the key subfields and their main questions?

You could think of this as "pre-research" -- getting oriented toward an area and building background knowledge. Let it be driven by your curiosity. Find a thread that seems promising and pull on it for a little while. Use tools like Deep Research for help, but you still want to read the key papers.

A good undergrad project is often a tweak of an existing result. I really like projects that use a well-defined, standard methodology, which allows the student to focus on developing research question and the work of data collection, analysis, and writing -- without having to design the entire process from scratch. If you find a paper that you like, think about keeping the same basic approach, but modifying the research question to explore a different angle on the topic. Conclusions will often suggest open questions for further work.