Undergraduates & Research
I started out as a laboratory dishwasher on an hourly wage. It wasn’t an undergraduate research experience. I wouldn’t be a science grant consultant now, a former principal investigator of research grants, or a former university professor of biology without starting out as a lab flunky. I was just a curious kid. I wrote about some of that in Pollinating the Petunias. Nearly 40 years ago, extramural funded research experiences for undergraduates were rare. Independent study or research opportunities were on the books for course credit, but few in my recollection took advantage of it. A friend of mine at the time (now deceased), received an NSF undergraduate research fellowship in chemistry. I was impressed and not a little intimidated by that accomplishment as I was likely what would later be called a second tier student. It was far from glamorous, but for me having that hourly wage job in the lab was better than working at Sears.
In that lab as a dishwasher and later research assistant, I learned what the process of research was really like. It’s long periods of nothing, if not drudgery; then excitement when results tell a story, only to go back to nothing again. Research takes time. It has its frustrations. These were valuable lessons when I later became undergraduate research coordinator in my faculty position. In that role, mentoring students I always started with time, “Do you have open blocks of time in your schedule?” If the answer was no, then I advised them to take seminar. Then it was about which labs or summer programs were most appropriate. Undergrads in the lab are not for everybody. They take more time and make more mistakes. Unfortunately nobody really tracked who went on to graduate school, but I know anecdotally that those experiences were important to them.
Nationally, we worry about STEM education, but have a surplus of life scientists. Where does undergraduate life science research fit into STEM career training? It’s really not about STEM education any way; it’s about the T for Technology and maybe the E of Engineering. The S for Science and the M for Math get the short straw. Math and the Natural Sciences are the foundation for Engineering and Technology. I wish more proponents of STEM educational efforts understood that.
A young undergraduate I know summed up her research experience this way:
“Investigated many possible protocols, read forty-year-old journal articles, repeatedly banged head against wall, occasionally managed to produce an uncontaminated culture of cyanobacteria, {and} wrote some stuff down.”
Undergraduate research should be about critical thinking and the process of science. This young woman gets it. She has had a taste of the frustration that happens all too often. Those are important life lessons applicable to many careers and jobs, even those outside of the STEM disciplines. Is it crazy to be mining 40-year-old journal articles? No. What long forgotten idea might lead to a new one? That’s creative. Science is a creative process, which is why STEAM education makes more sense to me, but that is a topic for future posts.