For what it's worth, my undergraduate experience was that we had very few opportunities to do any actual empirical* research in most disciplines. Most of the "

For what it's worth, my undergraduate experience was that we had very few opportunities to do any actual empirical* research in most disciplines. Most of the "research" positions available were just grunt work, and even in cases where we had the opportunity to perform some independent research, often we had to use relatively unreliable methodologies because the more robust ones required more resources than we had access to. I also found that a lot of hard science students didn't understand the statistical methods they were applying very well, but that's a different can of worms. * "Empirical" is a pretty big caveat here — I know some math majors that had the opportunity to carry out some substantive research, and I imagine the same goes for other disciplines that don't rely as heavily on labor-intensive (or capital-intensive, or both) data collection.