Accessing Research Experience
A shared challenge
Students considering a psychology doctorate are encouraged to gain research experience. Yet supervision opportunities may be insufficient to accommodate everyone interested. This calls for a collective response: asking each laboratory to accept ever more people cannot resolve the problem on its own.
Not finding a placement does not mean you lack potential. Access also depends on projects, funding, expertise and available time. Our supervision capacity page explains the commitments we can realistically make at the SAGE Lab.
A newly appointed professor does not necessarily have more availability. The first year can combine preparing new courses, establishing a lab, applying for grants and learning university procedures. Building the conditions for good supervision takes time before intake can expand.
Broaden the search for opportunities
Explore teams at other universities in Quebec, elsewhere in Canada and, where appropriate, abroad. Some contributions can be entirely remote: literature searches, coding papers, preparing materials, programming, authorized data analysis or reproducibility checks. Online participation can provide substantial experience when it includes a real role and appropriate feedback.
Look for paid positions, funded internships or course-credit opportunities where possible. Remote volunteering may also be an option when a team offers it and the arrangement is appropriate under the institutions’ rules. Unpaid participation is not something everyone can afford, and working remotely does not remove training or supervision needs.
Identify a few teams whose research genuinely interests you. Read their website and a relevant paper, then send a concise, tailored inquiry describing your specific interest, current skills, learning goals, realistic availability and ability to work remotely. A CV and an existing work sample can help. Do not promise expertise you do not yet have.
Before accepting, clarify tasks, supervising contact, feedback frequency, expected hours and duration, paid, credited or volunteer status, tool access and departure arrangements. For international roles, also check language, time zones and data-sharing constraints. This page does not guarantee partner teams or external placements.
Research with little additional funding
Avoiding new data collection can reduce spending. It does not make a project cost-free: work time, expertise, software, document access and review remain resources.
| Route | Possible contribution | What to check first |
|---|---|---|
| Existing lab data | A focused secondary question, robustness analysis or reproduction | Authorized access, consent and ethics, documentation, planned work and responsibilities |
| Public datasets and research repositories | Secondary analysis suited to a specific question | License, permissions, measurement quality, missing data and generalizability |
| Existing literature | A focused review, theoretical synthesis or meta-analysis | A useful question, method, access to texts and realistic screening and analysis workload |
| Existing code, findings and tools | Reproducing analyses, testing, documentation or methodological work | Skills, reuse rights, scientific relevance and a suitable reviewer |
| Funded new collection | Preparing a funding application for a feasible project | Budget, sample-size justification, ethics, timeline and available supervision |
The Open Science Framework and repositories linked to papers can help identify datasets. Library staff can also advise on resources such as Statistics Canada microdata; access conditions and costs vary. Material visible online is not automatically available for reuse. Check the OSF licensing guidance.
A strong course assignment can become the starting point for a writing project. Personal exploratory analysis can support learning and provide a work sample. Before describing it as supervised research, affiliating it with the lab or submitting it to a journal, confirm the appropriate arrangements. Use our student project decision tree.
Collective options to explore
These are proposals for discussion, not services already available:
- Circulate opportunities more effectively: share sourced announcements, dates and conditions, including remote roles. Each team remains responsible for recruitment.
- Share some training: arrange critical-reading, R, writing or reproducibility workshops with people able to lead them.
- Build shared projects through bounded modules: several people contribute reusable outputs to a coherent question rather than each starting an unrelated project.
- Share supervision where it genuinely exists: specify responsibilities for an experienced researcher or co-supervisor who has agreed to contribute. Peer help does not replace scientific review.
- Develop credited or funded opportunities: explore directed studies, internships and funding with the relevant university contacts.
The SAGE Community can support conversation, peer learning and information sharing. Participation is valuable in itself; it is neither an audition nor automatically supervised research experience.
Testing a solution first requires an owner, a small scope, time and a way to assess outcomes. Success would mean more high-quality learning without overloading students or teams.
A practical next step
Identify a skill to develop, a few relevant teams and a realistic contribution. Protect study time and explore several routes rather than waiting for one placement. Our guide to preparing for psychology graduate applications connects these steps with your training goals.