So, looking at the SRI studies of undergraduate research and its effects, it seems like the solution to a lot of problems. Involvement in research has been shown to increase student interest in science careers and increase the likelihood of graduate school, regardless of the race and gender of the student or the race and gender of the faculty mentor.
While this is undeniably really good news, suggesting that we don’t actually need to radically re-invent the way we deal with students in order to change the demographics of science, it’s almost too good to be true. There’s got to be a catch, right?
Right. There are two catches, really:
- It’s very difficult to effectively involve undergraduates in research.
- Undergraduate research is not particularly well rewarded in the current academic system.
Taking these in order:
1) It’s very difficult to effectively involve undergraduates in research. This is true on a lot of levels, mostly because undergraduate students, by definition, do not have the same background as graduate students. They’re not as well prepared to do independent work, and in some cases, they don’t really have the background to do research at all. This is particularly true in theoretical physics– you can always find some experimental project that involves fairly mechanical tasks like tightening bolts or making small electronic circuits, but people who do pencil-and-paper theory have to be really clever to find projects that allow students to make meaningful contributions.
Along with this, there’s the fact that undergraduate students tend to require a good deal more supervision than graduate students. They ask a lot of questions, and need to have their work checked on a regular basis. This can eat up a lot of time, and requires a good deal of patience. You need to be calm, patient, and positive in dealing with students, even when they break stuff, or don’t understand something after you’ve explained it three times already.
That can be really tough, particularly for some of the people who go into science.
(With the exception of one memorable breakdown (which is more a funny story than anything else), I’ve managed to contain my temper around my students. Kate gets to hear a lot of ranting, though– she’s way too good to me.)
Finally, there’s the fact that even senior undergraduates aren’t full time researchers. They have other classes to take, and other activities that they’re involved in. They’re not like graduate students, who can reasonably be expected to be putting their full efforts into the project they’re working on.
Taken all together, a good undergraduate is about half of a third-year grad student, in terms of research productivity– on a minute-by-minute basis, they can be as productive as a grad student who’s just getting their feet under them, but you only get them for half the time (full-time in the summer, and on a more limited basis during the academic year). A bad undergraduate research student is a dead loss.
Which brings is to:
2) Undergraduate research is not particularly well rewarded in the current academic system. At a small college like Union, tenure and promotion decisions are made on the basis of teaching and research, and undergraduate involvement in research occupies a weird middle ground. It’s sort of like teaching, in that you’re training students to do research, but it’s sort of like research, in that they’re doing, well, research.
This puts it in an odd place, with regard to the evaluation of faculty actiity. It doesn’t really count as teaching, because the time we put in on supervising student research projects is counted as part of our research activity. It doesn’t really help with research, though, in that progress tends to be much slower when students are involved.
This surprises a lot of people, particularly from the humanities, who assume that students must be a help in research, making it easier to get things done, but that’s not really the case. A really exceptional student moves things along, but as I said above, a good undergraduate is half of a young graduate student. I’ve been lucky enough to have some very good students working with me, but to be perfectly honest, the progress of my research would be faster if I just chased them out of the lab, and did everything myself.
If research is evaluated primarily based on publications, as it is, undergraduate student involvement can be a real drag on your measured productivity.
So if it doesn’t count as teaching, and it doesn’t help with research, why do it at all? Well, because of the benefits noted in the SRI studies– getting students involved in research is good for them, and it’s good for science in general. I’m not teaching at a small liberal arts college because of the financial rewards, I’m doing this because I believe in it. I believe that the opportunity for students to do research is one of the best things we have to offer for science majors, and it’s my job to provide that opportunity. And I really enjoy working with students in the lab, even if it does slow the pace of progress.
But this is the situation we’re in– the only people who are really committed to getting undergraduates involved in research are True Believers, and there aren’t that many of us. Which means that, even in light of findings like these, it will be really difficult to dramatically expand the involvement of students in research, unless we can make some changes in the academic reward structure.