Over the summer I'm helping a business school professor at a local university in my home town with his research. This will be my first time doing this sort of thing. For those of you who have done something similar, what can I expect? Like how many hours a week did you work, did you actually contribute anything meaningful or was the work basically mindless, ect.

Thanks for the feedback.

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This varies tremendously both from school to school, and from professor to professor. Usually you sit and talk with the professor about how long you'll be doing this and the kind of things you may be doing before hand. That said, this is one of the best things you can do in regards to Grad Schools and letters of recommendations other wise.

I did this last summer. I'm a math major, but I was working with the biology department on a human neuron growth project. My job was to write a program that tracked the growth of an axon--before this, tracking was done by hand. I felt like I was doing useful work; the doctor in charge of the research seemed to be pretty impressed with my final result.

The work was for eight hours a day, but actual work was a great deal less. I spent a few weeks in the research lab, which involved doing a lot of Western blots (i.e. some pipette work for ten minutes, followed by an hour of waiting as we centrifuged everything, followed by ten more minutes of work, then another hour of waiting...). After that I was actually working on the program, which meant switching between coding, looking up Matlab functions, and goofing off in the office I shared with five other undergrads.

It was really, really valuable, in that I got paid good money, got something great on my resume, decided that I really did want to go to grad school, and found out that lab work was definitely something I didn't want to spend my life doing. The programming wasn't that bad though.

do a good job with the mindless stuff and soon he will give you more responsibility.

Hey, I started out mopping the floor just like you guys. But now... now I'm washing lettuce. Soon I'll be on fries; then the grill. And pretty soon, I'll make assistant manager, and that's when the big bucks start rolling in.

Western blots, yuck...not all lab work is that boring