Background
For the last decade or two their has been an increasing emphasis on research experiences for undergraduates, especially early experiences like projects in interdisciplinary labs. It may well be something high school students ask about: will I have opportunity to participate in research at this school.Status Quo
Actually, we aren't doing badly for early research experiences in the natural sciences. But at present it's unsystematic: a "program" that is dependent on individual faculty members figuring out how to make it work. And, it remains an uncompensated form of teaching.In addition to the opportunities we CAN offer on-campus, we encourage them to go off campus for research, but that isn't exactly sustainable if enrollments keep increasing, and, insofar as sometimes funding follows students, it's giving away potential resources.
Capacities
At the moment, in the natural sciences, the limitation on research opportunities is largely a function of the number of research-active faculty (funding would be a limitation if the program grew considerably).In chemistry, for example, we have three people who are research active, and each could manage, say, two summer students. So at most we can host six summer students, or less than half of the declared chemistry majors.A Scalable Plan
A first step would be to identify impediments to maximizing summer research capacity with existing faculty. Perhaps next we look at resource constraints that limit number of interns per faculty member (noted above as 2 in chemistry, for example).
A next step might be to develop some proposals (either by discipline or across several) and investigate funding for something along the lines of the REU programs at other institutions (the ones we send our students to).
It might also make sense to focus on infrastructure and on developing parallel programs in the social sciences and perhaps even the humanities. Ultimately this could evolve into summer employment for faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track), fuller facility utilization, a way for students to fit in credit hours without taking 5 courses, and be a boon to retention.
Something we had for a while was a fund that faculty and students could apply to to do a summer collaborative project. The amount was small, about $1500 for the summer, but still having the fund (which was managed via UROP) was really powerful and encouraged summer projects in a range of disciplines.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't solve the issue that faculty basically give their time in the summer to the college to do summer research with students (especially outside the sciences where it isn't expected), but such a fund would still be helpful.
As for the limitations on student support, some of it is equipment (I have one solar simulator, so can have one kinetics project going, so more than two students means someone is sitting around every day), but some of it is just faculty attention. Even at places where there is a very robust summer research program, usually faculty can't support more than 3-4 students or all of their time is taken up with solving student problems, rather that writing and preparing for the fall.
I realized just after I hit publish that there's another issue I should clarify -- most places with research requirements have most students engaged in research during the senior year, either over a semester or over the year. But to open up that time, science students take very few "regular" courses (and often no lab courses) in the senior year. My senior year, I took four semester hours of research each semester, working 12 hours a week in the lab.
ReplyDeleteAt Mills, to save money and increase enrollments, we rotate all of the upper division chemistry courses, so our students take heavy loads in the senior year so don't have the open time to do research.