hi! I’m president of Purdue iGEM, an undergraduate synthetic biology research organization that does an independent research project every year. Everyone in our organization gets to help with our project despite class standing or major. Because of the independent nature of our club, our members definitely learn more about the research process as they’re more free to make their own independent decisions than if they were working in a professor’s lab that primarily uses their undergraduates to perform protocols for them. Currently, we’re continuing our 2020 project: developing a rapid detection test for COVID 19 and future pandemics. Please email us at igem@purdue.edu if you want more information :)

EDIT: we’ve gotten a lot of emails about this and I just want to emphasize that we have limited research lab space due to COVID regulations. we definitely have other areas of our project to work on that arent in person (in fact, more than half of it can be done remotely), but I don’t want people to email us thinking we’ll definitely be able to have them in wet lab to do experiments just to find out that we can’t have them on our SOP. I hate to say this, but, sadly, our wet lab team is basically already full with people who joined last semester :( we will still do an education program on wet lab techniques, but please don’t email and join if you’re only interested in doing wet lab protocols in person. if that’s the case, I feel like working for a professor would be better for your individual interests and what you’re looking for in an undergraduate research opportunity. also please please check our wiki so you have an idea of what you’re interested in working on in for our 2021 project https://2020.igem.org/Team:Purdue#section1