Don’t be shocked but the research that you will be doing soon in your grad school, or at least the methodology, may be quite different than what you would have expected when you were a prospective grad students applying in number of schools. Imagining yourself surrounded with alien instruments may become reality for physics or other pure science students but not necessarily true for engineering and other students. Doing research does not always involve use of cutting edge technology but always means finding something new, involve analyzing some data, and reaching to some conclusions. A research may be as specific as solving some particular existing problem or somewhat broader. In any case, the research begins with the study of existing papers in the related subject.
