By Jia Zhang & Olivia Chung, PSA student life interviewers
Jia Zhang: Hi Douglas, I am Jia, and this is Olivia. Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Douglas Forrest: Yeah. I’m Douglas Forrest. I am a fourth-year behavioral neuroscience major and a philosophy minor. I’m currently working in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Lab, which is headed by Dr. Christoff.
Jia Zhang: Great, thank you! What has been your research journey at UBC so far?
Douglas Forrest: My research journey started at the summer going into my third year, where I started to be serious about applying for certain labs. I sent a lot of cold emails, work-learn applications, and such, then I got into the Behavioral Neurogenetics Lab, which is headed by Dr. Rankin. I volunteered there in the summer where I was trained up, and in the September of my third year, I started a Directed Studies project that continued throughout the year, which was a really good experience.
Nearing the end of it, though, I started to question whether it was completely aligned with my research interests, so I resigned from that position and started again to look for different labs to participate in. So again, I sent more cold emails and a few work-learn applications, then I was fortunate enough to have a TA, who was a graduate student in one of the labs I was applying for, in one of my neuroscience classes. One day, after he finished the guest lecture, I went up, talked to him and figured out that there was research happening in his lab. From there, I worked in his lab over the summer as a volunteer. Then last September, I started my fourth year as a paid RA (research assistant) and have been working ever since.
Jia Zhang: Wow, that’s a long journey. With so much experience, what tips or advice do you have for undergraduates trying to get into psych research?
Douglas Forrest: The first thing that comes to my mind is don’t just send one email when you are doing the cold email journey. Coming out of high school, I was under the impression that one email would be enough and if they didn’t respond back, it means they rejected you. But in actuality, the people who are running these labs have up to a hundred emails a day and potentially even more, so it’s very easy for your email to get swept on the rug. Therefore, it’s good to have persistence to follow up with your emails.
The other thing that I’ve found, which has happened to my friends as well, is that it is really a golden opportunity if you have a TA in your class who is in a lab that you are interested in as a graduate student or a lab manager. As I talked earlier, email is not super effective at communicating with people who you want to reach out to because they receive a high volume of emails, and lab websites are usually not up to date, so it’s really good to have the opportunity to talk to your TAs after class, get a quick five minute understanding of the research that they’re doing and the availabilities in their lab, and it’s helpful for them to know you.
The other important thing is coding experience. The majority of the psych labs I know have a great emphasis on coding experience. Having coding experience is really helpful since a lot of analysis procedures that you will do involve coding experience, and with it, you are able to do those repetitive and rudimentary tasks really quickly. For me, I only did Comp Sci 103, which is very basic, but I learned what a program is, what data types are, how to make a loop and such. More importantly, with that knowledge, I was able to learn the basics of MATLAB, Bash, and R very quickly, so I would heavily recommend taking a course like that to just get started on coding experience.
Jia Zhang: Thank you for sharing those tips! You mentioned that it’s probably a better idea to approach you TA in person. Do you also have advice for people who want to make a connection with their TA in person?
Douglas Forrest: That’s a good question. I did feel a lot of stress going up to my TA because you want to make a good impression and respect their time. A specific tip I have is that if you want to talk to someone who needs to go to another place soon, make sure to be cognizant of time when you are talking to them because they can’t necessarily stay for 20 minutes.
Jia Zhang: Right. Let’s imagine that there are many students who want to make a connection with your TA, what do you think would make you stand out?
Douglas Forrest: One thing that greatly helped me is that I already emailed my TA, so he was aware of my email but just hadn’t had time to respond, so I think sending an email ahead showed that I was truly interested in joining them.
Jia Zhang: That’s a good point. You also mentioned that it’s important to get experience with data. Do you have any recommendations about how to get started on it? What courses did you take, or did you self-learn?
Douglas Forrest: The majority of the formal learning I had was only in the Comp Sci 103 class. In addition to that, what really helped me is when I started my first lab experience, I tried to utilize what I had learned in that class as much as possible. For instance, one time, I could have just done everything in Excel, which was a typical way of making an assembly line of formulas. But instead, I decided to make a program not necessarily because it was faster, but because it was helpful to work on the knowledge I had. Because Comp Sci 103 was a condensed summer course, and I didn’t have a lot of super formal training, I think that most of my learnings about how coding works had happened from these applied situations.
Jia Zhang: The main point is being curious and trying different things. How have you explored and developed your research interests throughout your undergraduate?
Douglas Forrest: It’s definitely been a journey because as mentioned, at the start, I was really into neuroscience research, so I went into the neuroscience lab at the start of my third year. After working in that lab and working very intimately with the data, I became to realize that I was more into the more predominant psychological aspect of the research. I’m not sure how much I would’ve been able to discover that if I hadn’t gone into the research, worked with it, and been in the lab. So if you are thinking you’re interested in a new field, I would highly recommend you to engage with the research as much as possible to see if that is really for you.
Jia Zhang: You brought up an interesting order because many students don’t get research experience exactly because they don’t know if they’re interested in it, and you suggest that it’s helpful to firstly get some experience to know if you like it.
Douglas Forrest: Definitely! For people in the second or third year trying to get experience, it’s probably good to have a vague idea. But at least in my experience, it wasn’t me thinking that I wanted to have specific types of psychology research because of two reasons: one, it’s hard to figure it out, and two, oftentimes you don’t have many labs lined up to choose considering the competitiveness of getting into a lab, so I advise to get into a lab first and explore after.
Jia Zhang: Another follow up I have is, some students don’t get used to research or they don’t actually like it. So, how do you think they differ? What would be the difference?
Douglas Forrest: I think that for me, I knew I wanted to do research in the future, and I’ve been pretty adamant about that since second year or so.
But I think that it’s important to note whether you are picking up things that are more about general research. Even if you don’t like the research itself, there are still things that you could do. For example, presenting in lab meetings and communicating scientifically, or personally a really exciting part of the research for me was analyzing the data. The creativity and different analysis procedures you can do and the excitement in getting a significant result and presenting it to a lab, those are the kind of things that almost transcend the topic a little bit. So it’s important to make sure you’re enjoying those as well, because that’s kind of what the science’s all about,
Jia Zhang: So to summarize that, you’re into research because you just have so much excitement to show your possible results to everybody.
Douglas Forrest: Yeah, totally. I think that if somebody’s uncertain, because I know a few people that are like, “Oh my God, I went into research and I hated it and it was like the worst experience of my life.”
And it’s important to question if it is because of the lab I’m in or because I just don’t like research. Additionally, am I into the general transcendent scientific concepts?
Jia Zhang: Yes, of course. And then the next question, how do you transfer from a volunteer position into a paid position?
Douglas Forrest: I think it’s important for people to know that oftentimes, at least in my experience, labs do expect some volunteer experience before a paid position is even on the table. I’ve only heard of a few situations of my friends being paid right off the bat or getting a paid position without ever working in the lab before, so it’s important to expect that.
Another thing that I thought was, in my experience, making sure that if you are wanting to have a paid position that you advocate for yourself and really make sure that’s a priority in your mind. There were a few situations at the start of my experience where I was expecting the pay positions to come to me, and I was expecting the researchers, the graduate students, or the PI to be like, “Oh, here’s a work-learn; here is an NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Counsil of Canada)”. And sometimes that is the case, but these are really busy people, so it’s not something you can really expect to come to you. The second time I was doing my lab position, I was thinking about, “When are the work-learn dates? My graduate student might not know about work-learn. When do I have to tell him to apply for the funding or when do I have to apply for NSERC myself?” I think it’s really important to take initiative, but also advocate for yourself and make it known that this is something that you do want.
Jia Zhang: So regarding that, is it possible that the lab manager declines giving you a paid position due to the lack of experience?
Douglas Forrest: I think that that happened to me, the first experience I had there had to be like seven undergraduates. There were a lot of undergraduates. Since you’re not the only undergraduate, it doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get the funding.
If it happens, it comes. You have to compete with everybody. So, there is definitely a competition, it’s definitely not guaranteed for sure, but it still is important. It’s important to have open communication. Personally, I experienced a bit of difficulty talking openly about money. It really is important that you do bring up the discussion regardless.
Jia Zhang: Talking about money, do you have any tips recommending yourself to the lab manager?
Douglas Forrest: I’m not sure if I have any specific tips. I think that I was really lucky when I was bringing it up. They were very supportive. Moreover, I was dealing with very helpful people. But to be honest, I’m not really sure.
Jia Zhang: Thank you, Douglas! Those all my questions regarding the first half of the interview. Olivia will take the second half of the interview.
Olivia Chung: So, one question I have is how has your role as an undergraduate in research evolved throughout your degree?
Douglas Forrest: There’s been a lot of differences between my first lab experience and my second lab experience. One most predominant. The first experience I was in was a very supervised independent undergraduate research environment—in the sense that I was the one collecting all the data. I was the one processing all the data and analyzing the data under the supervision of a graduate student.
This new research position that I’m in, the Cognitive Science Lab, I’m helping a graduate student with their project. It’s a master’s project, and I am trying to help them out with that. Interestingly, it’s not the same amount of work I’m doing with before—I’m not doing everything.
So for instance, I’m not super involved in data collection. But at the same time, there’s a different air to it because these results are eventually going to be published—that’s the plan. It’s a different yet positive change.
In addition to that, I think that there’s an interesting dynamic between the two positions. The second position that I’m in, I feel like I’m less being supervised. I’m being supervised by gratitude and treated more like a research partner. In that sense, if there’s a task that needs to be done, it’s not like, “Here’s how you do this task. It’s more like, do this task, and try to figure it out the best you can.” There’s more independence in that way and less supervision—more of a teamwork.
Olivia Chung: To build off of that, throughout your undergraduate research journey, were there any big obstacles that you remember or any big achievements that you learned a lot from?
Douglas Forrest: The first thing that comes to mind is I participated in the MURC and NURC conferences, the Neuroscience Undergraduate Research and the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Conference, that was super helpful and very scary—it was super intimidating going to it. I did a poster and an oral presentation. Both were very nerve-wrecking, but it was really good to work through that because I do want to be somebody in the future who can communicate these things in a really concise way and not be phased by any sort of public speaking.
Olivia Chung: The next question is how are you involved in your current research project?
Douglas Forrest: Yeah, so my current research project is an fMRI study. Specifically, we’re scanning the brains of experienced meditators while meditating. These experienced meditators, when they’re meditating, are going to report when a thought happens. And when a thought happens, they’re going to press a button, and then we’re going to look at the neural activity before, during, and after that thought. So theoretically, you can see the biological and neural correlates of when the thought is arising, becoming conscious, and then when it’s elaborated on.
So working on that project in the summer when I was just volunteering, the main thing was designing the fMRI tasks. “How is the stimulus going to show up for the participants? What are they going to see? How are we going to collect their behavioral results?” And much more, such as mundane, logistical things like, “What if they fall asleep and accidently hold down the button? How are we going to detect that?” So during the summer and the start of this year in September, data collection started, and I started working on what’s going to happen to the data after it’s outputted from the fMRI scanner.
When the fMRI comes out, it’s not ready to be analyzed, so you have to make sure it’s in a specific data structure. You have to make sure you are removing certain things like motion, which is a huge issue. So I was preparing programs that can process the data easily when it comes out.
And right now, specifically a few months ago, we started on our analysis. Again, how are you going to write programs? This is all predominantly very coding. Moreover, how are we going to write programs that when the data is all ready to be analyzed—can it be analyzed really quickly?
Then there’s also working on the behavioral results as well as the neurological results.
Olivia Chung: Do you think this research fits into what aligns with the research that you want to do in the future and continue further into?
Douglas Forrest: Luckily, I think that my second guess was much better than the first. I think that Cognitive Neuroscience seems to be the field that I’m really interested in. I was talking a bit about this before, but the level of psychological to biological is good. Where you’re seeing the psychological events in the scanner, they can tell you about what’s happening in their mind, but at the same time you’re looking at the activation as well, so I think it’s a really good balance. Before this, I thought I was more into neuroscience, but the level of analysis at the biological and genetic level was not the level of analysis that I was really into, so this kind of psychological level of analysis was much more fitting.
Olivia Chung: Do you think any other courses from our UBC program during your undergraduate degree has helped you with the research that you’re currently in? Additionally, are there any courses that you possibly recommend doing with the field of research that you’re doing?
Douglas Forrest: Statistics and Computer Science are the ones that are needed, especially since the correlation models for fMRI are huge. I had no idea. I just learned about in Statistics, and I was surprised to see it again so suddenly. And as for Computer Science, it’s just really needed throughout research. In terms of the neuroscience courses—interestingly, I did all of them. I believe 370? 371? I think those are some psychological ones. To be honest, I don’t think those helped too much because I think it really ties back into the idea that it’s important to go and actually do the research to see if this is for you.
Olivia Chung: Thank you so much for the information. And the next question would be, what interests you about your current research?
Douglas Forrest: My current research project—the really big unique nature of it is in terms of how they are measuring introspection. So, the idea is that these experienced meditators, they had over 300 hours of meditation experience for this study. They’ve been trained in this meditation technique where they’re sitting there and they’re noting when a thought comes and focusing on that only. Additionally, they’re keeping their mind as calm as possible, knowing when a thought comes and focusing on the breath. The idea is that they have an enhanced introspective ability beyond anybody who hasn’t meditated before. There’s a really interesting way to get around this issue that’s predominant in this kind of research where it’s really difficult for people to report their internal states. I thought this was a very interesting method to combat that, and I was really interested to hear more. In addition, the things that have been important for me in this project and in the lab in general has been the integration of philosophy, psychology and/or cognitive neuroscience.
I’d never really knew that was even a thing that people could do, where they could have a neuroscientist and a philosopher on the same publication. I was looking at a lot of papers published by my current lab, and it happens all the time. For instance, in my lab, a graduate student came in and started talking about philosophy and we all had a philosophical discussion, and it’s just overall been really interesting to see how you can integrate these two disciplines in a really effective and harmonious way.
Olivia Chung: Do you have any minor recommendations that could possibly help the other psych majors if they’re trying to choose a minor?
Douglas Forrest: If you’re trying to choose a minor, I don’t know if I would be super great to ask. I think I did philosophy because I was really interested in it and I needed a philosophical component in my life. But in terms of usefulness, I’m not really sure. When I think of usefulness, I think of Computer Science or Stats. Which people aren’t really going to choose—but I don’t know if you’d want to minor in that.
Olivia Chung: I’m guessing you’re possibly going into your master’s with the learning that you’ve attained?
Douglas Forrest: Yes, totally. For a while I’ve been certain I’m going deeper into the academic route, so a graduate student, master student to PhD, to postdoc, eventually become a researcher.
Olivia Chung: Has your research currently impacted what you possibly want to do with your masters?
Douglas Forrest: This might be a little bit more of like a logistical point, but the idea of learning about fMRI, and just working with the data is really important. This has been important to me because I plan on doing cognitive science that contains a lot of fMRI scanning. fMRI is really considered the workhorse of cognitive science—and knowing this research method is really crucial for studying in this field.
Although there’s a lot, and it’s like an insanely overwhelming technique, there are so many things to know, so getting exposure to that early has been really valuable to me. Additionally, I think it’s been more on the passion end of how it informs my future. What has really been interesting to me is realizing how tough it is to determine internal states when you’re studying psychology—like to really get inside people’s minds. I think that the research topic that I want to go into is the cognitive neuroscience of subjective emotion, which kind of deals with similar things that is in my current project that’s doing thought generation. Subjective emotion is difficult to determine people’s internal mental states, and it’s hard for people to report it consistently and get a nuanced understanding of what’s happening in your subjective emotion or in the thought generation. So, now it’s got me thinking of how meditation specifically can be used to address subjective emotion. But also, just in general, I try to think about how you could surpass that issue after recognizing how difficult it is.
Olivia Chung: Lastly, how would the project you’re working on inform your future research?
Douglas Forrest: It’s just understanding the difficulty of introspection and how you’re going to match that. How are you going to get in people’s heads? How are they going to report it effectively and start thinking about how you are going to figure it out in the future. That’s been the biggest takeaway for sure.