This proposal recommends that we strengthen support for undergraduate research at Mills. It specifically highlights one area where we currently have little institutional support: Resources for student participation in faculty-led research.
Importance of Undergraduate Research: The benefits of undergraduate research are numerous. Undergraduate research fosters an active participation in the pursuit of knowledge. It deepens students’ understanding of a discipline, allows them to develop skills central to that discipline, and promotes creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking.
It fosters close mentoring relationships between faculty and students, and allows for opportunities to build self-esteem and leadership skills, develop professionalism, work as a collaborative team with others, and clarify career goals. Studies have shown that introducing students to undergraduate research early on and for an extended period of time aids in the retention and performance of undergraduate students, increases the likelihood that students will pursue careers in these areas, and may especially benefit underrerepresented minorities in the sciences.
Today, it is increasingly common for graduate and professional programs to require incoming students to have some undergraduate research experience outside of the classroom, and many fields increasingly expect research experience with a faculty member or in an established research setting.
Involvement in faculty-led research has many special benefits. Students gain experience working in real laboratories and professional settings, and thus they have an opportunity to develop more advanced skills in their discipline. A faculty member may spend many weeks and even many months training and supervising a student, and because most of our programs are strictly undergraduate, our students are in a unique opportunity to play a central role in faculty-led research compared to those at large research institutions (where graduate students take on these roles). With advanced training and supervision, undergraduate students at Mills often gain experience and accomplish skills that are at the graduate level, and such projects are more likely to yield opportunities for publishing and presenting research at professional conferences. This is a definite advantage for undergraduate students at Mills and is one of the qualities that makes us unique.
Faculty-led projects are often larger and students may come together across disciplines and majors to work collaboratively and gain perspectives from these other disciplines. Students are likely to be at different academic levels, and, thus serve as role models with each other. This is not only educational, but can build a sense of community for students. Because faculty-led projects are extensive and usually have a longer duration than student projects, they allow for a longer protracted research experience for students. Work on faculty-led projects fosters independent work as well as teamwork, and can still provide opportunities for students to develop smaller independent projects. For example, in some cases, students may have opportunities to attach independent projects to the larger project. In other instances, students may be able to take on a portion of the faculty-led project and develop this as an independent project.
Faculty also benefit from undergraduate involvement in their research and in some disciplines, student involvement may even be essential, as in the sciences, where a research team is necessary to complete a research project. Faculty also benefit from student ideas, creativity, and energy in their research. Thus, providing resources for student participation in faculty-led research not only benefits students, but also benefits faculty. It is a win-win situation.
Current Status: Currently, we have inadequate support for faculty-led research at Mills. The Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) helps support small undergraduate research projects (and even these funds are limited). The Faculty Development fund is terribly insufficient and in many instances, award amounts are too little to support student participation, especially when the cost of the research project itself takes up (or exceeds) the funds awarded. Much faculty research takes place in the summer when faculty have more time to devote to research and projects and labs can operate on a regular or full-time basis. Many students must financially support themselves in the summer or need to move home to locations outside the Bay Area for living support. We have very limited summer research support at Mills, and a summer research program that would involve student stipends and summer housing would allow more students to be able to take advantage of research opportunities and ensure continuity (i.e., less disruptive turnover) of student involvement in faculty-led research. Such a program would also be more equitable for students, since it is often the more financially disadvantaged students who must to choose a paid job over a research experience in order to support themselves.
To support faculty-led research, we also need more support for the infrastructure of existing labs and equipment, computers, and research supplies, and physical space dedicated that is dedicated to this. Mentoring students in faculty-led research requires a very large time commitment and is often the equivalent of teaching an additional course, so support for faculty is important and essential. I believe that much of this mentoring takes place on Fridays and may reflect a greater amount of curricular activity on Fridays at Mills than is actually apparent on the books.
A "Request For Comments" blog on proposals related to undergraduate programs.
From retreat. We should not a priori decide what the right incentive is for everyone. On the one side, it's not clear that EVERYONE needs to be engaged in this. On the other, for some folks credit toward a course release might be the most attractive while for others having research funds might be.
ReplyDeleteProposal: develop a flexible plan a bit like an airline frequent flier program that can be denominated either in points/dollars or free flights. We give some sort of accumulate-able credit for supervising research and faculty can accumulate it as credit toward a course release or the cash equivalent in a research fund.
Say we price a course release at $7500 and we say you get a course release when you supervise 20 URs over 4 semesters (i.e., max credit per semester is, say, 5). Then you accumulate research funds at rate of $375 per supervised student.
Thinking like this has the added benefit of allowing us to estimate the overall cost of undergraduate research (at least the supervision aspect) and then strategically budget for it. For example, suppose our goal is that half of graduating seniors have done UR by the time they finish. If we graduate 250 students a year that's an average of 125 URs per year which would work out to about 47,000 per year.
Before we groan at the cost let's remember that what we get for that is capacity to tell students considering Mills that half our students do UR. Is that enough? Remember we have lots of other experiential opportunities so we could probably move toward a package that let's us say every student does one or the other or both.
On the faculty side, assuming at least some of the supervised research is the faculty member's "own" work, we are effectively supporting faculty development at the same time.
I've tried for years to figure out how ug students could participate in my research - unhappily, not even first year grad students are up to speed enough to participate at any level; therefore, for me and other faculty like me, such 'joint research' is one more tutorial/ind study. so I would need an incentive such as course release.
ReplyDeleteu.g. joint research could be thrown in with ind studies to count toward an eventual course release.