I'm a first year master's student, and I joined a robotics research lab at my university about 3 months ago as an independent-study student. Since then, I've been working mostly with a 2nd year phd student in the lab, but I haven't had much interaction with the PI at all, outside of biweekly meetings that involve the whole lab.
I was recently asked by the professor whether I wanted to stay for another semester as an independent study student, but I have a few concerns about whether I should.
I'm very new to the world of academia and am not familiar with how labs usually are run, but I wanted to ask if it's the norm for a professor to not spend a lot of time with their master's students? Also, the professor refers to students like me as "interns" rather than "grad research assistant" or similar titles that my friends get called in their respective labs. Would you consider this a red flag at all? Or just some weird nomenclature the professor decided on?
Looking forward to hearing from you guys!
