 Hey there Bruins! Here's a quick overview of how to develop a research plan from your friends at the Undergraduate Research Centers. When engaging in a research project, it's important to develop both long-term and short-term goals. Short-term goals are process-oriented and can be divided into things that you can do, while long-term goals are outcome-oriented, such as publishing or submitting to a conference. For instance, if your long-term goal is to present a poster at Undergraduate Research Week, then your short-term goals may include attending the event to see what other students have done, speaking to your advisor about submitting, figuring out the deadline for submissions, and working on an abstract to submit. To assess whether or not your long and short-term goals are concrete, you can refer to the acronym SMART as a tool. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. Specific. Ask yourself, who is involved in my goal? What do I want to accomplish? When do I hope to have the project finished and what is its timeframe? Where are the key locations included in the project? Why am I pursuing the project and what are its benefits? And how will I accomplish my goal? Measurable refers to the data and information associated with your project and how you will assess whether or not you've actually hit your goals. Ask yourself how much or how many in relation to your sources, data, and analyses, and how will I measure whether I've met my goal? Achievable. Ask yourself, have I left myself enough time and have I left myself enough resources? Relevant. How is the goal relevant to your interests, your research, and your academic success? How does this project fit overall into your long-term career goal? And timely. Ask yourself if your goal is situated within a realistic and defined timeframe. Now that you know about the difference between long and short-term goals and how to use SMART as a tool, give it a try. Start by brainstorming your long-term research project goals and thinking about how they relate to your research topic or question. Ask yourself, what are the steps that you need to take to go from your research topic to your long-term goals? Now that you have a research project as well as a long-term goal for your project, you might be thinking, how do I get from my topic to my final long-term goal? Most research projects can be broken down into a research process that starts with choosing a topic and developing a research question. Next researchers find, organize, and evaluate sources from which they draft an argument, map the project, and describe its conclusions. While doing this, you'll also be writing and creating the project and going through multiple revisions before finally presenting the work at a conference or submitting it to a journal. It's important to keep in mind that the research process is not a linear process and that you'll often be doing many of these steps simultaneously. For instance, as you're writing, you may realize that you come across many unanswered questions that prompted you to go back and continue reading, analyzing, and evaluating data. Effective research plans anticipate the challenges that may arise at each stage of the research process. When developing a research question, it's often challenging to figure out how specific or broad to make that question. When searching for sources, you may find a wealth of info that makes it challenging to evaluate the reliability of those sources and makes it further challenging to synthesize them with one another. Here are some tips and strategies to help you out along the way. Divide your research project into short, manageable tasks to accomplish within defined time frames. Schedule regular meetings with your faculty mentor and come up with a plan for items to produce for each meeting. For course papers, utilize your professor's office hours to get a sense of their expectations for the project and to make sure that it's on track. Schedule regular time to work on your research project and also schedule writing or research dates with friends or others working on research. Now that we've addressed common tasks, challenges, and strategies, let's apply this to your project. Looking for help with the next steps? Come set up an appointment at the Undergraduate Research Center and talk about your project today.