This is a bit of advice for lucky students who get to do research with a professor.
Take this opportunity seriously. Either you make it your top priority, or you don't do it at all. That's the message. Read the rest of the page if you want to know why and how.
I heard once that your boyfriend or girlfriend will ask increasingly tough questions as your relationship ages:
Your advisor may also ask these questions. At first, he'll be happy that he attracted a smart student to work on a problem that needed working on. But he may sour if he comes to feel that he's wasting his time on you, or would have been wiser to assign the project to someone else.
Here's some basic advice targeted at new research students. There are also many webpages about how to be a “good grad student,” which should also be useful to undergrads doing research.
Time Commitment • Make plenty of room. In order to make research your first priority, you may need to reduce your courseload or extracurriculars. This is worth discussing with both your academic advisor and your research advisor. • Find out what the deadlines are. For example, there may be a target for submitting a paper to a particular conference. When planning for deadlines, bear in mind that everything will take twice as long as you expect—or four times as long if you've never done it before. Often a paper takes roughly a year of work for a grad student (if it includes experiments), although they may be working on other things during that year as well. • Be honest. If you suspect that you may not have time to do justice to the project after all, don't string your advisor along. Take a deep breath, apologize, and explain the situation. Then your advisor can make an informed decision about whether to suspend the project, give it to someone else, get a grad student involved, etc. This is better than a slow burn of agitation on both sides.
Time Management • Prepare for meetings. Establish a fixed time for weekly meetings with your advisor (and perhaps with senior students). Bring results, questions, and an agenda to your weekly meeting. • Make weekly progress. Set goalposts, and be sure you make real progress from week to week. Use your meeting time or email each week to make sure that you agree on what the goal for next week is. • Take the initiative. Be somewhat self-directed—find readings, play around with code, do mini-experiments. But do keep your advisor posted by email.