Scientia | Undergrads in Lab Coats

Undergrads in Lab Coats

By DAVID BRILL

"Because other nations have, and probably will continue to have, the competitive advantage of a low-wage structure, the United States must compete by optimizing its knowledge-based resources, particularly in science and technology."

—From Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future, National Academies of Sciences, 2005

As an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech, Philip Rack was convinced that there had to be more to education than endless hours of lecture and tedious textbook lessons. In his sophomore year, Rack, driven by that conviction, wandered into a research institute at the university. "I nosed around until I ran into this guy who was working on a simulation project," says Rack. "He was looking for someone to do grunt work."

Rack—as hungry for the experience as he was for the supplemental income—signed on. For the next several semesters, he continued to work in the laboratory, and though he earned little more than minimum wage, he'll be the first to tell you that the job paid significant—and enduring—dividends. "What I learned was extremely useful in teaching me to approach research problems systematically," says Rack. "I got my hands dirty, and the work gave me a taste of the opportunities available out there in the sciences. Ultimately, it helped me define what I wanted to do for a living." So following graduation, he remained anchored to the research bench, though he shifted geographic locations, earning a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Florida before joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee.

Now serving as an associate professor in UT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rack is in many ways a poster boy for undergraduate involvement in research. A number of studies have confirmed the value of such involvement: Students like Rack, who participate in research as undergraduates, are much more likely to stay in school and to pursue graduate education. Their communications and problem-solving skills are greatly enhanced. They develop more focused career goals.

Beyond that, experience in the laboratory brings science to life in a way that classroom instruction can't. "The hands-on experience teaches these students things they will never learn from lectures," says Veerle Keppens, an assistant professor in materials science and engineering who engages undergraduate students in her research in materials properties. Among those lessons, Keppens insists, is persistence. "Through firsthand experience, they discover that very few experiments work out on the first trial."

Keppens and Rack are two of many UT research professors in the field of materials science who invite undergraduate students to participate in their research efforts. Among others:

Brian Edwards and David Keffer, associate professors in the Department of Chemical Engineering, lead UT's Computational Materials Research Group, where they position undergraduate students shoulder-to-shoulder with faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students on its research projects.
Under the guidance of John Larese, professor of physical and materials chemistry, undergraduate students contribute to the missions of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Chemical Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Tennessee Advanced Materials Laboratory. Their research explores neutron scattering, synthesis, thermodynamics, and computation.
Dayakar Penumadu, professor and research fellow in civil and environmental engineering, supports undergraduate research on multiphasic materials with funding from NSF and General Motors Powertrain, among other sponsors.
Chemistry professor Janice Musfeldt has directed more than a dozen undergraduate students on projects as varied as optical spectroscopy of molecule-based magnets and infrared microscopy of organic superconductors.

Un-Shifting the Paradigm

Among the recommendations in Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities, produced by the Boyer Commission in 1998, is the call to

. . . make research-based learning the standard. Undergraduate education in research universities [among them, UT] requires renewed emphasis on a point strongly made by John Dewey almost a century ago: learning is based on discovery guided by mentoring rather than on the transmission of information. Inherent in inquiry-based learning is an element of reciprocity: faculty can learn from students as students are learning from faculty.

Beyond the direct benefits to students and professors, undergraduate involvement in research may also contribute to the nation's future prosperity. According to Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future, a special report produced by the National Academies of Sciences in 2005, America's economic future may well hinge on producing smarter college graduates or, if not smarter, better trained in the fields of science and technology. "Economic studies conducted before the information-technology revolution have shown that even then as much as 85 percent of measured growth in U.S. income per capita is due to technological change," the report reads. "This nation must prepare with great urgency to preserve its strategic and economic security."

Surmounting Obstacles

Undergrads in Lab Coats At the heart of science and technology—and more broadly, the process of discovery—lies research, which has long been the province of graduate students who bring proven scholarly achievement and focused interest in specific disciplines. But for many undergraduate students, opportunities to engage in meaningful research are often limited. In some cases, the limitations are imposed by professors who deem undergraduates unreliable and unable to grasp—much less explore—complex hypotheses and research challenges.

In other cases the students themselves, unaware of other options, site their educational aspirations entirely in the classroom setting, continuing to rely on the process of the lecture, recitation, and rote learning that formed the cornerstone of much of their K-through-12 education. That's a fundamental mistake, according to Colin Hendricks, who wrote on the subject while studying at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism. "Instead of looking for the knowledge we do have, research forces students to look for the knowledge we don't have," writes Hendricks in "Not Just a Job—An Adventure: Undergraduate Research," published in 1996 in The World of Research at Columbia University. "It's a process of looking for holes and trying to plug them, which is completely different from the classroom experience of learning what others already know."

Exclusion of undergraduates from research opportunities may be standard procedure at other universities, but in the research realm, particularly in chemistry, physics, and materials sciences, UT continues to invest heavily in the productive capacity of its undergraduate students. Those professors who open their laboratory doors to undergraduate students have learned that these students can be eager learners, as well as capable scientists-in-training. Claudia Rawn, an ORNL scientist and assistant professor in UT's Materials Science and Engineering Department, is the first to insist that the learning is reciprocal. "My experience with students in the lab forces me to think of new and better ways to communicate in the classroom, to conduct my own experiments, and to write my technical papers," says Rawn.

For chemistry professor John Larese, the rewards are a bit more esoteric. "It's always an intoxicating moment when you see the penny drop or the light bulb click on in the process of discovery," he says. "It's those experiences that remind me that mentoring in a basic research environment and helping students decipher how the natural world ticks are among the most privileged pursuits in the world."