Before Giovanna Tomat-Kelly enrolled at the College of New Jersey, her idea of research involved a man in a white lab coat, someone who resembled Albert Einstein more than her. She didn’t imagine it as something she could do, especially as an undergraduate.
But a program at the college called Gateway to Research Careers in Science, directed at underrepresented students in the biological sciences, offered her an early introduction to research. Students rotate through four to six “minilabs” their first year, allowing them to experience different research fields in biology before choosing one to focus on. Ms. Tomat-Kelly chose plant ecology. She spent the next three years examining New Jersey’s forests with her faculty mentor and conducting her own research projects.
“The Gateway program truly was a gateway into research for me,” she says. Since graduation, she has held several research jobs and is now applying to graduate programs. Her goal is to become a professor, and to work with young students to show them that research is both important and accessible to them, too.
How to give more students opportunities in the lab or in the field — without breaking the bank.
Across the country, colleges are looking to involve more undergraduates in hands-on research. Academics say it teaches important skills such as problem solving, resilience, and how to work in a team. It is also seen as having a positive effect on their academic success and persistence.
The Council on Undergraduate Research, a membership organization of researchers and colleges, has seen an explosion of undergraduate research at all types of institutions, says Elizabeth Ambos, the nonprofit group’s executive director.
In the past six years, membership in the group has doubled, to 13,000 members representing 900 institutions. The growth has been in both the humanities and STEM disciplines, Ms. Ambos says.
While interest has grown, involving more students in meaningful research work comes with challenges. It requires significant investments of time from faculty members, many of whom may not have worked with undergraduates as research assistants. And it requires money.
Plus, colleges have to build a culture that rewards researcher-student partnerships, and to look for ways to reach students who may not know about the opportunities.
In a time of tight resources, some colleges are finding ways to solve these challenges and widen the pool of undergraduates doing research.
Here are lessons from two of them, the College of New Jersey and George Mason University, which have been recognized for their undergraduate-research efforts.
Add to the Curriculum
The College of New Jersey, near Trenton, reworked its curriculum in 2004, says Jacqueline Taylor, the provost. Courses were made more rigorous, and many departments built undergraduate research into their curricula to expose students to research methods and opportunities earlier and more frequently.
The public college, which serves about 6,800 undergraduates, emphasizes the model of teacher-scholar to faculty members. Recognition of faculty members’ time and effort working with undergraduates is considered in promotion-and-tenure decisions. The college has built in ways to count as part of teaching loads the time-intensive work of mentoring undergraduates in their research projects, Ms. Taylor says.
While such mentoring is not a requirement, it’s “a plus factor” in job evaluations. “There are campuses where if you publish a paper with an undergrad, it hardly counts in terms of your own scholarship,” the provost says. “But it counts here. We know that that undergrad would not be publishing that paper without that faculty member.”
Each summer dozens of faculty members (this past summer it was 49) participate in the college’s Mentored Undergraduate Summer Experience. About 100 students live on the campus for eight weeks and collaborate on research projects with faculty members. The emphasis is on creating knowledge and learning workplace skills such as working toward a goal.
“I tell people that teaching undergraduates to do research is a little bit like teaching your kids to cook,” Ms. Taylor says. “You don’t bring them into the kitchen because they’re going to save you a lot of time and make it easier to get the meal on the table. You bring them into the kitchen because they need to know how to cook.”
George Mason put a greater emphasis on research as it sought to transform itself from commuter college to top-tier research institution. As the university hired more professors doing high-level research, faculty members wanted to raise the level of student work, too, says Bethany M. Usher, associate provost for undergraduate education.
Research experience is built into courses at three levels, she says. The “discovery level” is part of introductory classes and early courses taken by new and transfer students, giving them an understanding of what it means to do research. The “inquiry level” teaches students research methods. The “upper level” is where students do their own scholarly work.
During the change, which started in 2012, Ms. Usher was director of the Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, and Research, known as Oscar. She ran workshops to help faculty members and departments think about how to include research opportunities in curriculum, classes, and capstone projects, and to find ways to connect teaching with professors’ scholarship. The office provided grants to faculty members and departments to help them do so. The grants ranged from $1,500 to more than $20,000, with most of them between $5,000 and $10,000.
“We know it’s more work, and it’s better for the student,” Ms. Usher says. “We recognize it and appreciate it.”
Provide Financial Support
As with the grants that George Mason offered to faculty members, financial support — for both instructors and students — is key to expanding research opportunities. It’s especially important for students who are supporting themselves in college and who may choose a summer job off campus rather than an unpaid spot in a research program.
“Students need money,” says Janet Morrison, a professor of plant ecology at the College of New Jersey. “Money is a barrier.”
The college provides stipends of $2,500 and on-campus housing for students in its summer research program. The academic-affairs budget has set aside $248,000 for those purposes, says Ms. Taylor, the provost.
The college does not have a history of large donor gifts for undergraduate research. But its first endowed chair, announced in 2014, is for faculty members who collaborate with students on research and exemplify the teacher-scholar model. Ms. Morrison is the first to hold the chair.
George Mason provides financial support to students during the summer and throughout the academic year. The university budgets about $800,000 for undergraduate research, including grants for students, faculty members, and departments. It has been able to stretch that funding and get more students involved in undergraduate research by using federal work-study funds to pay for research-assistant jobs for students who qualify for the program.
That’s made a significant difference in expanding research opportunities. More than 100 students now do research as their work-study job, says Ms. Usher, the associate provost, and she would like to double that number. Use of the funds has also attracted more women and minority-group members, she notes. The office works with students to help them fill out the paperwork and works with faculty members to help match them with students who qualify.
Leila Martinez-Bentley was one student who got involved in research through the work-study program. Paying for her own education and working at Starbucks, she qualified for federal work-study support and was able to get a paid job as a research assistant with an archaeology professor who became her mentor.
That job gave her enough experience that the professor invited her to Mexico to help work on a dig for two and a half months. Ms. Martinez-Bentley received a summer grant from George Mason. “I was only able to do it because I got the funding,” she says.
Provide Personal Support
Money isn’t the only kind of support needed. Personal support, too, makes a difference. That can include helping connect students with researchers, offering training for students in how to act professionally in labs and conferences where they might present papers, and sharing lessons in how research often includes failures that lead to other discoveries, to demonstrate the importance of persistence and resilience.
At George Mason, students who receive funds attend mandatory workshops on professionalism, research skills, and topics such as how to write a proposal or talk about their research. Ms. Usher has found that her role is often to help students solve problems they haven’t encountered before — for instance, how to talk to their mentor when they’ve ordered the wrong chemicals for the lab.
“Doing research isn’t always about results but about the process and the problem-solving that goes along with it,” Ms. Usher says. “In addition to learning more of those specific skills, they also get support, so that they don’t give up too early in the process.”
“That idea of perseverance is one of the major skills they learn,” she says. Teaching students what to do when they hit a roadblock in their research, and how to pivot when an initial idea fails, is important.
“That’s one thing we talk about a lot. None of them are going to end up doing the project they propose at the beginning,” Ms. Usher says. “Having the confidence to be able to do that is one of the most important skills we can teach.”
Melissa S. Morgan, a communications-studies major at the College of New Jersey, says she was anxious when she started helping a professor with his research. She felt overwhelmed by the fear of getting it wrong and her work not being good enough.
In addition to talking with friends for support, what helped Ms. Morgan was guidance from her mentor, the communications professor she was working with. He told her that it didn’t matter what she put down first as a hypothesis — what was important was telling the truth about what she eventually found or didn’t find. “All that matters is the results,” she says now. That helped her gain confidence in her research and in presenting her work when she traveled to conferences.
Start Students Early
Students can be nervous about asking faculty members to be a mentor. Or they don’t know how to approach a professor at all. There are also students in the academic middle, so to speak — the ones who aren’t standouts in their classes — who have an interest but don’t see themselves as possible candidates. How do colleges get them involved?
Ms. Morrison, the plant ecologist who is Ms. Tomat-Kelly’s mentor at the College of New Jersey, has been thinking about that. She starts students in her labs as “shadows.” They go on site with the research team and observe the older students. Then they move up to helping with Ms. Morrison’s research, and finally to conducting their own studies. Putting the onus on students to reach out to faculty members, the professor says, is a barrier to getting more students involved in research.
Ms. Tomat-Kelly agrees. Freshmen can be uncomfortable approaching faculty members. But for her, the Gateway program erased that sense of awkwardness because it brought the faculty members to the students and put students in the labs.
Getting involved early offered many benefits. She had opportunities to do summer research at her college and at another institution, and she formed a deep connection with her mentor — someone who continues to be a role model after graduation. If Ms. Tomat-Kelly had waited to get involved, her experience would not have been as significant.
“You can’t really get that if you go in as a senior,” she says. “It’s brief. And you don’t get as deeply involved in the research, either. A year, you learn the basics, and that’s it, you’re gone.”
