Honors Research Program in Psychology

Proposal

The Psychology Department would like to propose a new undergraduate program that matches the goals of your working group to identify new undergraduate programs to increase enrollment and enrich the curriculum. We call the new program that we are proposing the Honors Research Program in Psychology and it builds on the accomplishments and strengths of our department and would enrich the curriculum and increase undergraduate enrollment.

Description

The Honors Research Program in Psychology would be a targeted toward high school and resumer student prospects that are intellectually talented and highly motivated to pursue a scientific career in psychology research. The goal would be to educate a group of talented students who would be highly qualified upon graduation from Mills to attend competitive scientific research programs at the top university programs in psychology. These students would be selected when they applied to the College for admission to Mills. This program would “fast track” these students into the research programs in the Psychology Department, would create new advanced courses on statistics and the research process in Psychology, provide extended experience in the research laboratories in the department, and culminate in a high quality independent and collaborative research project

Visibility, Institutional Reputation and Enrollment

This program would be unique and attention-capturing. Given the popularity of psychology nation-wide, we could attract a large number of talented students to Mills, with necessary resources added to our existing program. Such a program would be a magnet for bright students and might, as a result of the reputation and success of our graduates, bring talented students interested in sciences like Biology to apply to the College as well. Our department is one half of the popular Biopsychology major and it is likely that our colleagues in Biology and Chemistry would benefit from an influx of students pursuing psychology and biopsychology.

Building on Existing Strengths

The proposed program builds on the strengths of the Psychology Department. Psychology is usually the largest or second largest major at Mills College and the department graduates between 30 and 40 majors per year. The faculty members have active research programs spanning cutting edge research in biopsychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, health psychology, infant mental health, and aging. The faculty regularly present and publish their research findings at prestigious conferences and highly ranked journals in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine. Our research programs always include students as research assistants and collaborators. There are currently four laboratories conducting research in the department: the Mills Cognition Lab, the Laboratory of Psychology and Health, the Mills Early Childhood and Family Research Lab, and the Mills Social Psychology Lab. We regularly send students to some of the top universities in the world. We are now getting inquiries from graduate programs where our students have applied or attended to encourage our top students to apply to their graduate schools because our students are exceptionally bright and well-prepared for graduate study in psychology. An Honors program built on these strengths would be a powerhouse and would be recognized as one of the best undergraduate programs for psychology, nationally and internationally, if it were implemented and provided with resources to support research excellence.

Enhancement and Growth

If the Psychology program was able to have enhanced research laboratories, technical equipment, and more faculty members, the curriculum could be expanded to include the courses needed to support honors students. These include the frequently requested advanced courses in statistics and research methods, courses that would also fortify the Infant Mental Health undergraduate Psychology/Master’s degree program. We know from our students that research experience, mentoring, and course offerings are important considerations when choosing Mills. The proposed program would enhance the current Psychology tracks and be in a desirable location to study psychology. Students would be attracted to up-to-date research laboratories, ample course offerings, access to personal mentoring by outstanding faculty, better preparation for a scientific career in research or applied psychology. All of this located in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area on a campus dedicated to the education of women. Mills mission as a women’s college also more likely to draw students to an outstanding Honors Program in Psychology because women are now earning the majority of doctoral and master’s degrees in the world.

Outreach Programs to Boost Reputation and Enrollment

Colleges are often represented through their athletic department. However another way to represent the College is through a solid "outreach program" in the arts, sciences and humanities. This type of program targets high schools and/or other colleges as a tool for recruitment.

Examples

An outreach can take many forms and it can be organized departmentally or through a division. For example, the Dance Department went to Berkeley High, the Crowden School, Santa Rosa University and Hayward College and presented a "lecture demonstration," which is basically a mini concert with a presentation done by one Faculty member. It can include a discussion about artistic processes, a period of questions and answers, presentation of the curriculum and sometimes have activities that will involve students’ participation.

Science departments could develop a small repertoire of "road shows" that would be of interest to high schools in the Bay Area (or beyond). Social science departments, likewise, could offer talks and demonstrations. In both cases, some research would be necessary to determine just what topics and genres would work for different audiences and would play on the strengths of our faculty and students.

The Leverage

The Admission office also goes to various conferences and presentations and makes school visits, but sending faculty and students directly to schools and showing the actual work we do in person with some of our students can establish strong connections and enrich the visited school even as it benefits us visibility. Even if the students in these various schools do not end up applying to Mills, they might attend an event on campus, talk about Mills with parents or friends or simply take with them a positive Mills experience.

To make these “outreach programs” truly beneficial for the College, they would probably need to be organized in an "officially" with a vision behind them.  For example, they might be grouped by theme or by division. They would also need to be coordinated with the Admission Office; if the event takes place in high schools, someone from the undergraduate program should participate. If it’s another college, someone from the graduate admission should accompany the group etc.

What It Would Take

Transportation should also be considered as a part of the infrastructure necessary to make something like this work.  The PE department is able to go "on the road" because it does have its own vans.  A program like this would probably need to have a similar resource on hand to make it work.  And we would have to figure out how to fit this into our already busy schedules; no small thing, but do-able.

Having someone with vision and some modest resources in charge of such an “outreach program” could produce something that is a great recruitment tool as well as helping to spread the education and culture that Mills has to offer.

See Also: "Capitalize on Public Performance/Lecture Spaces"

Examples at Other Schools

"Fruitville Elementary Joins New College Archaeology Day"
Faculty and students host a Saturday event to introduce K12 students to "public archaeology" on the New College of Florida campus.

More Undergraduate Research (especially, but not only, in sciences)

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.

Make the 2+3 Engineering Program Really Work

Proposal 

Figure out how to make our 2+3 Engineering Program with USC more “Mills,” perhaps by adding more freshman and sophomore level intro engineering courses.

Rationale

We currently have a program with USC where a student will take the first two years of coursework at Mills and then transfer to USC to complete her engineering degree.  This is an innovative program that really does have the potential to attract to Mills smart students that we will not otherwise attract.  To date, though, we have not dedicate resources to it that would help it to thrive.

The program doesn’t work well in practice for a variety of reasons.

• First, students must walk in to Mills knowing they want to be engineers on day one. If a student doesn’t get onto the engineering track the first semester of her first year, she won’t be able to do it. 
• Second, two of the more popular fields, civil and mechanical, aren’t feasible under this program. Our program only caters to the more science-based engineering degree (chemical, computer, biomedical, environmental). 
• Third, without critical mass there is very little chance for the good experience of current 3+2 engineering students to be visible enough to recruit others.

What Would It Take

• To support all engineering sub-fields, we could add a few intro engineering courses. 
• To encourage current students to consider the program, a first semester overview and introduction to engineering could be offered.
• To remove the rigidity problem faculty could develop slight modifications to course scheduling that would introduce the necessary flexibility for, say, deciding before second semester.
• To increase flexibility, summer courses might be offered.
• A more robust program could be better marketed by admissions.

Research/Data

What do we know about how many students are drawn by our engineering program?  What are the numbers for young women interested in engineering overall.  Followup with students who have gone through program (0 have finished; 3 are in process at USC). What courses we need to offer to make our program more effective.

See Also

Occidental 3+2 Program (a useful FAQ and curriculum plan)

Faculty Driven Trans-Disciplinary Major Pilots

Idea

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors to be offered for a few years on a pilot basis.  The menu on offer would vary from year to year as lessons were learned and interests evolved.  For something similar, see the programs at Evergreen College.

Introduction 

Like many liberal arts colleges, Mills allows students to “design their own majors.” These institutions also, from time to time, consider curriculum changes including the creation of new majors and (much less frequently) the elimination of existing majors. When the two processes are contrasted, interesting differences emerge. The former leaves the inventiveness in the hands of sophomores, the latter in the hands of distracted committees, status quo bias, and turf battles. The products of the former, even if an excellent idea, are rarely repeated. The latter, even if a bad idea, are rarely repealed. The list of contrasts could go on, but the bottom line does not require it: our processes for curricular innovation leave a lot to be desired.

The future of women’s education depends on changing this. The pace of change in world of higher education is such that offering an education that is just as good as and just the same as except for women only is not likely a sustainable. If we continue to be guided by our 19th and 20th century educational legacy, we stand to produce graduates less and less well prepared for 21st century lives. This will reduce the attractiveness to new students and reduce the success of graduates and, in turn, reduce the level at which they can support the college.

Women’s colleges like Mills, if they are to serve women who will lead change in the coming decades must themselves be able to lead change in what it means to be an institution of higher education. One piece of this is to re-think what it means to “major” in something.

Majoring in the 21st Century 

What should students at women's colleges major in? For a long time we have tried to change women’s position in the social division of labor by getting more women to major in subjects that had tended to be dominated by men. In some fields, like medicine, this project has been quite successful (The Lancet 2009); in others, like computer science, quite disappointing (Stross 2008).

These efforts, while laudable, are, ironically, not very future oriented. The academic paths we encourage our students to follow in pursuit of breaking barriers and ceilings are on maps designed to solve the problems of a previous century. The time has come to think about training leaders not in terms of the legacy of disciplinary boundaries and social problems of the 20th century, but rather for the problems and opportunities that lie ahead.

In other words, what they should major in in the 21st century is the 21st century.

What would this mean? Even without crystal balls, we can guess that the leaders of tomorrow, in technology, arts, and politics, are going to be boundary spanners, most likely not the "interdisciplinarians" that we have talked ineffectively about for the last few decades, but rather "transdisciplinarians" whose tool kits ignore boundaries and who possess the ability to collaborate with colleagues with alien skill sets.

It won't do to reprise previous efforts at top down, monolithic, a priori curriculum reform. We need to eschew the old approach of appointing committees and voting up or down wishy-washy consensus plans based on what we wish we had studied in college. In its place we need an infrastructure that will facilitate faculty experimentation and curricular reconfiguration in ways that do not depend on university committees, decanal decrees or foundation grants. In effect, we need to import some of the virtues of “startup culture” into the academy.

We should explore how women's colleges can reinvent themselves not to prepare women for traditionally male occupations but for a world that is not yet here and to do this in ways that other institutions will want to emulate. It will focus on ways to build an innovation infrastructure that encourages, facilitates and rewards faculty for engaging actively in this process.

A Preliminary Vision 

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors in consideration of

1. existing intellectual and pedagogical resources, 
2. an analysis of future problems and challenges in American and world society, 
3. an assessment of the opportunity structure in the graduate school and employment markets (to optimally match “novel” majors with career paths likely to be open to them). 

Faculty would commit to a given sequence of courses and advising students for a set number of years. Faculty would then be in the position of “selling” the program to entering students; if there were no student interest, there’d be no program. Similarly, faculty and students would evaluate such programs on an ongoing basis, making changes or even eliminating the programs as indicated. Programs that are particularly successful could be institutionalized in majors “on the books” if desired.

We expect that novel programs like this will prove attractive to excellent students and to outside funders currently desperate to find student oriented new ideas. The institutionalization, not of particular "majors," but of this process, can lead to a general institutional nimbleness that is rarely seen in organizations like liberal arts colleges.

Opportunity

Amid the litany of problems facing women’s liberal arts colleges like Mills lies opportunity. Contrary to the position some have taken, the project of educating women can be called a success without saying that it is over. According to the National Center for Education Statistics women will continue to earn about 60% of the bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. each year – over one million per year – during the next decade (National Center for Education Statistics 2010). This is not a small market. But to enroll these students women's colleges need to take the lead transitioning from "just as good as but different" to “different and better.”

Colleges like Mills tend to be small, under-resourced, and have relatively low rates of staff turnover, all factors that make innovation challenging. These same factors can make it possible to create an environment in which small experiments can flourish. We should attempt to take advantage of these characteristics and this demographic trend to expand our impact on society.

Works Cited 

1. National Center for Education Statistics. 2010. “Degrees Conferred by Degree-granting Institutions, by Level of Degree and Sex of Student: Selected Years, 1869-70 Through 2019-20.” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_279.asp. 
2. ———. “Digest of Education Statistics, 2007.” 
3. Institute of Education Sciences. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp. 
4. Ryan, Dan. 2012. “Majoring in the 21st Century.” http://majoring21.blogspot.com/. 
5. Stross, Randall. 2008. “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” The New York Times, November 16, sec. Business. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html. 
6. The Lancet. 2009. “Women in Medicine—a Future Assured.” The Lancet 373 (9680) (June): 1997. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61088-6..