What value does one derive by doing research as an undergrad vs spending that time in coursework/projects For background, I'm currently enrolled in the honors college for both my majors (CS and Econ) in my university. Honors for each major means that I have to take 1-2 courses per major where the only focus is research.
While my &quot;main&quot; major is CS (the one I spend the most time on, will use for jobs later), I'm not sure I want to do honors there. I could be taking grad courses that go deeper into topics that interest me and can do research on the side (ie as part of a prof's group) without those credits.
For Econ, I'm more concerned. I've heard it's more important for an Econ student to do honors and it would be much more difficult for me to do research without the designated courses. However, I don't plan on going to grad school for Econ as of right now (I'm thinking about doing an MBA/masters in CS if it helps). Furthermore, basically every place I apply to doesn't care whether I've done honors or not.
I joined for the learning and experiencing research in undergrad, but it seems difficult to justify when the same time/credit hours can be spent doing something else that would be more applicable to jobs (ex. taking a grad lvl deep learning course).
How would I go about evaluating whether the honors is worth it in either major? What value does one derive by doing research as an undergrad?
Research is totally different than anything else you do in schooling. It's the distinction between learning what everyone else has done before and learning something no one knows yet (no one ever).
Do you need to learn truly new things to be a productive member of society? No, you really don't. Our society is really advanced, and almost all the work out there is about doing things people have done before. You could spend your whole life learning what other people know and never come close to learning it all.
Do you need research experience for a non-academic career that doesn't involve research? No, probably not. That said, depending on the research environment you can also get exposed to a lot of more broadly applicable job skills as well when you do research.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether research is worth it. It's hard, probably you'll fail in almost everything you do as you get started unless you're given a very simple project, but you can still learn a lot. If nothing else, you might learn whether research could be a path for you in the future, or whether you should avoid it.