By Janay Fox, PhD candidate at McGill University

One of the most fun and rewarding things you can do in grad school is start a side project with your fellow grad students. It’s a chance to dive into something you’re passionate about, build your skills in developing methodology, planning experiments, and really start thinking like a scientist—all without having to rely too much on your supervisor.

If you need funding, there are plenty of grants out there that you can apply for. For example, you can apply for the QCBS excellence award, the Graduate Research Excellence Grant Rosemary Grant Award through the Society for the Study of Evolution, or the Langhammer Fund which offers funding for projects involving livebearing fish. Applying for these grants can also give you hands on experience in grant writing, which is a very useful skill. My friend Alexis Heckley and I started a side project to investigate that we managed to get funding for from two different grants. We even approached a professor to chip in some funds in exchange for taking two of his students along on our trip to gather data for their theses.

In February 2024, we headed to Trinidad and successfully pulled off our field experiments. Our project aimed to investigate how researcher sampling could be impacting Trinidadian guppy populations. To do this, we collected guppies from highly sampled and lowly sampled sites and then measured length and mass, several different behaviours, and male colouration. We are currently working on the data analysis to identify any differences in these traits that may be driven by researcher sampling.

This whole experience not only gave me the confidence to tackle research projects on my own but also helped me build all the skills I’ll need to be an independent researcher. If you’re in grad school and thinking about doing a side project, I say go for it—it’s totally worth it!