I'm a senior in CS and will be finishing my undergrad this coming semester at a university with a well-respected CS department. My school has a 1-year extension to our B.S. that gets you a master's, and I'm in that program. The program does not require any research, but recently I've gotten interested in the idea of doing research and possibly a PhD after my master's.
The thing is, the whole research thing being a recent interest, I have no experience whatsoever with academic research. I also have had very little contact with my professors throughout my time here, since I've been doing fine in classes and I've never really needed to talk to them. I do ask/answer questions in lecture more than the average student, but I rarely see professors outside of class. I do have a number of fairly complex projects on my resume (several that I'm still involved in), but that's complexity in terms of coding on a large code-base and not in terms of fancy theoretical stuff.
Is it too late for me to get involved in research? If not, how do I actually get started? Do I literally just send someone an email?
