Resources for Student Participation in Faculty-led Research

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.

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.

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.

Faculty Research Assistantships as Financial Aid

Idea 

Suppose a small fraction of institutional financial aid were re-packaged as “faculty research assistantship” work study. Faculty members would be granted a budget for use during the academic year.

Context 

Consider the following facts

1. Many Mills students receive institutional financial aid. Some of these receive this as merit aid. 
2. All told, the college provides between $15 and $20 million UG FA per year. 
3. Faculty support resources are limited. Faculty do research. Faculty can use research funds to hire students. 
4. There is a push in higher education to give more students experience working with faculty on research. 
5. We struggle with ways to give faculty teaching credit for engaging in research work with students. 
6. Some of us balk at that if the faculty member’s research that is furthered (even if the supervision requires time/effort). 
7. Some institutions require students to work in campus jobs as a way of cutting operating expenses. 
8. Research shows that a top tool for retention and for long term attachment to institution is close working relationship with a single faculty member. 
9. Students learn best by doing. Skills may matter more than knowledge in “real world.” 
10. Some students learn best via intense and focused concentration on a single problem.

The What

Suppose we were to use $1 million dollars (about 5-8% of FA budget) and it goes to 500 students. That’s $2000 per student. At $10 per hour that would be 200 hours. But maybe make it best job on campus and so pay $15. That’s 130 hours. Over two semesters that’s about 5 hours per week.

We have on the order of 100 faculty. The above numbers would allocate 5 students to each faculty member on average. That might be high so let’s imagine that other units on campus get some of them. Or maybe better to work the calculation from the faculty side. Let’s imagine the standard is every faculty member gets the equivalent of roughly ten hours per week of research assistance. Using the above numbers that would work out to something like 200-250 students getting a $2000 faculty research assistance award and the total would be more like $500,000.

Administration. Faculty would need to “apply” with a description of tasks and skills needed and certify intention to actually have the work done during a given semester/year. The paperwork and time sheets and such could be handled through the same procedures that work study is currently.

Outcome

25% of student body has first-hand experience working on faculty research. Something like 25,000 hours of faculty research gets done. Even assuming that an hour of student research assistance is worth only 15 minutes of faculty work, that’s like giving each faculty member 65 hours. Given that we pay faculty on average something like $50-75/hour that’s turned into a $3,000 to $5,000 benefit.

In the aggregate that’s about $300,000 to $500,000 support for faculty work per year accomplished primarily through re-purposing funds with little net change.

These awards could be touted as special. They become a line on a resume distinct from “I got financial aid.” They might be fund-raisable in a manner that distinguishes them from just financial aid or just faculty support.

We note that this comes out of student time but we also note that from a pedagogical time it is time well spent. If we are an educational institution, it is not a stretch to say that spending time working for a faculty member is more likely educational than watching the door in the library.

Details 

A smart person could figure out what the error rates would be : how many folks would not get a position and so how would we handle the fall back in terms of financial need. One option might be to award slightly more work studies awards to faculty than there are students with awards. Make creative use of a little competition among faculty for talented students. Those who have interesting jobs and who train people well will be more likely to find research assistants. Add too a bit of funding that would allow someone who needed research assistance but could not find someone with work study to have funding to pay for help outside the system. 

Maybe restrict it to research work (not TAing) or maybe not. The awards might go only to sophomores and over if experience is an issue.