Undergraduate Students

The Research Assistant position is a great opportunity for those who want to become more familiar with research! This is a great opportunity to see if you might want to apply to graduate school and/or whether research might be part of your career. However, we are interested in working with you regardless of your future career goals. 

We typically accept new undergraduate students at the beginning of each term, but we encourage you to apply whenever you are interested and we will look at all applications when we are recruiting new undergraduate students. If you applied in the past and did not get contacted, feel free to contact our lab coordinators and/or apply again! 

Undergraduate Research Assistants at the Baby Learning Lab typically volunteer in the lab about 9 hours per week. These hours will typically occur during work hours (Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm) but may also occur during the weekends, upon further discussion. Your time in the lab can look like a variety of different things: playing with children while their sibling completes a study, emailing or calling families to schedule appointments, attending recruitment events in the community to help us reach out to families, helping us with some daily research tasks, coding videos of babies as they are experiencing the world, etc. With scheduling appointments, we put a heavy emphasis on this as it is very vital to our lab. Without any families coming into our centre, we simply cannot run our studies. Once trained and comfortable, you could also be a part of helping our researchers run their actual studies, aiding them in distracting the babies when attempting to take head measurements, and administering questionnaires. Part of this time commitment is attending lab meetings (currently every other Friday at 3:00pm-4:30pm). 

Dr. Emberson is very keen on having students take on more senior research assistant roles once they’ve been in the lab volunteering for two semesters. These include  honours, directed studies, and (paid) work learn students or to apply for paid summer positions in the lab (AURA, NSERC USRA).  

If you are interested in joining as an Undergraduate Research Assistant, please complete the form below. Please include any courses you’ve completed that relate to the lab. You should also include any experience you have with children and families and/or reaching out to community members either in your work life or in your personal life. We are interested in hearing about a variety of work experiences, so we encourage you to apply even if you don’t have formal research experience or experience in psychology. 

We are also interested in having undergraduate students join us with a diversity of background experiences. For more information on this, see the Diversity and Inclusion pledge for the lab and Dr. Emberson’s personal pledge. 

Please also take a look at our Research Assistant lab agreement, which gives you more insight into what working in the lab looks like. 

If you have additional questions about the position or application, please reach out to the lab at ubcbabylearninglab@psych.ubc.ca 

*If you are interested in joining the lab now as a directed studies, honours, etc student rather than a volunteer research assistant. Please write to Prof Emberson directly at emberson@psych.ubc.ca. Currently we are not accepting any more students for these positions for the 2023-2024 academic year. In general, priority for these positions is given to students that are already in the lab or have previous, relevant experience. Please note that if you are not a part of the lab but do have any relevant experience and are chosen for one of these positions, extra hours may be needed, outside of the role’s regular hours, in order to be trained on how the lab runs, our extensive database, and our other daily lab tasks. Also, please note that these positions may vary in terms of what you may be asked to do. The honours, directed studies, and work learn positions will all look different in terms of your day to day than RA positions. More information will be given during selection process and upon official hiring.

Research Assistant Application Form

  • What research topics in the UBC Baby Learning Lab most interest you? What kind of research are you excited to be apart of?
    *All applicants that identify as Black and/or Indigenous will be included in our pool of interviewees.
  • Please read our lab's diversity & inclusion statement here: https://babylearninglab.psych.ubc.ca/research/diversity-inclusion/
  • Why do you want to have an opportunity to work in the UBC Baby Learning Lab? What experience are you hoping to get from this lab? Please also specify if you are applying to be a general RA or a coding RA.

*Unfortunately, we are currently not accepting students through PSYC 240 because we require 2 semesters, 9 hours per week commitment from our research assistants. However, we encourage you to apply to be a volunteer research assistant using the form above and if you are offered the position, we can accept you to complete 2 credits of PSYC 240 for one of your two volunteer semesters.