Failed undergraduate research project: does it belong in my CV? I'm an undergraduate who is going to apply for scholarships and to graduate school in physics in the coming months. At the start of last semester in August, I tried to join a group of a respected professor, where I was assigned a theoretical project. I've met with him maybe three times during the few coming weeks, before we mutually agreed that the assigned problem is pretty much a dead end. The professor had no idea for another suitable project, so I decided to join a different group, with which I stayed until very recently, when an analogous issue occured (but in this case I have actually done some work until that happened).

I was debating whether this "project" deserves being mentioned in my resume, at least for the sake of continuity, and so far have received contrary pieces of advice. Currently, that project is listed on my resume as follows:


  Worked with […] at […] on a project attempting to reformulate the
  definition of quantum-mechanical work for autonomous Hamiltonians.


I am certainly not going to ask for a letter of recommendation from that professor since there are others who know me much better. I only want to know whether the inclusion of the above description in my resume would have a positive or negative influence on my application.
I think for an undergraduate student, it is quite valuable to show that they have experience working on a diverse range of problems with different people, even if some of such projects do not lead to anything substantial.

Usually for grad school application and other fellowships there is an essay component. It may also be useful to mention such projects (briefly), and how such experience clarified your research interest/taught you how to do research/provided cross-disciplinary/cultural experience, etc. The exact messaging of course depends on what you think the program is looking for from the applicants.