UCLA's program inviting undergraduates to participate in faculty research projects could be the new wave at universities...
learning research
It’s not a new argument. As American research universities continue to evolve into vital, cutting-edge centers for discovery and new technology, one of the institutions’ most valuable assets has been more or less left out of the action. According to critics, while graduate students are intimately involved in faculty research, undergraduates are mostly left out of the loop, typically seeing only the end results of the discoveries and missing out completely on the thrill — and education — of the hunt.
But at UCLA, arguably more than at any other comparably sized research university, that is no longer the case, thanks to the innovative — and successful — Student Research Program (SRP). Conceived back in 1985, the program, which invites undergraduates to parti-cipate in faculty research projects on a voluntary basis, started out with 90 students; a decade later, 1,400 students, many staying with a professor for more than one quarter, are fulfilling 2,000 quarterly contracts a year.
“If you’re an undergraduate at a research university, you ought to take advantage of what a research university has to offer,” says Edward A. Alpers, professor of history and dean of honors and undergraduate programs in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, whose office administers the program.
A good example is Professor of Physiological Sciences V. Reggie Edgerton’s laboratory research into neuromuscular physiology and plasticity, which includes as many as a half-dozen SRP students at any given time. “This is often the most important part of a student’s undergraduate career,” says Edgerton. “It’s where students learn how to learn, rather than how to memorize — where they have to think and try to solve problems.” Students entering Edgerton’s lab are initially trained to carry out routine procedures, but the ultimate goal is to allow them to conduct independent work, which is why they’re encouraged to stay at least a year. Among numerous independent projects, Edgerton’s SRP students have performed experiments testing the effects of growth factors on muscle-fiber size and investigating the biochemical changes that occur in the spinal cords of spine-injured animals.
“It sometimes comes as a surprise to students that we’re not just doing biology as it’s taught in the introductory course,” says Elma Gonzalez, a professor of biology who has taken an active interest in programs that support underrepresented students interested in research careers. SRP volunteers in her laboratory take part in everything from collecting assays on a series of samples to conducting their own experiments. It’s only through this exposure, says Gonzalez, that undergraduates realize such disciplines as chemistry, biochemistry and physics also come into play in biological investigations. “The motivated student can gain a context for the information he or she hears in the classroom, learning how to use it in its various dimensions,” points out Gonzalez.
Maybe even more important to budding researchers, they learn about patience. “You don’t always get an equal return for the time you spend in the laboratory,” Gonzalez notes. While students know what will come out of a couple of hours of studying in the library, they can labor two hours in the lab with equipment that won’t function or on an experiment that just won’t pan out. And though the research process may differ in the humanities, wading through manuscripts and texts rather than test tubes or numbers printouts, the bottom line doesn’t. “It’s often slow, and it takes a great deal of effort before you see any results,” says Robert Aguirre, assistant professor of English, who sponsors SRP students for his research in Victorian literature and autobiography. “I think it’s important for students to see that.”
Melissa Mardiros sees it now. For the past year, the psychobiology senior has worked in the laboratory of Psychology Professor Larry Butcher on a project designed to determine the role of the brain’s medial pathway in Alzheimer’s disease. Six months into her stint, Mardiros was tabbed to run a particular experiment in which laboratory mice learn how to navigate a maze, then are tested again after receiving a lesion in the medial pathway, which contains many of the neurons responsible for producing acetylcholine, thought to be the major neuro-transmitter for Alzheimer’s disease. Besides the behavioral measure, the study will also investigate whether a correlation exists between memory impairment and the neurons degenerating in the medial pathway. “Little research has been done on this pathway — and none involving mice,” explains Mardiros. The under-graduate quickly learned the value of patience when she realized that the mice in her study weren’t learning to run the maze as quickly as those in a pilot study she had previously completed.
“In lectures, professors try to expose you to their research, but other than reading the results, you don’t really know what went into it,” confesses Mardiros, who says that even though she was mentally prepared for the unpredictability of the research task, she couldn’t fully understand its scope until she actually went through the experience herself. “This is a lot of painstaking work, but it’s worthwhile.”
Before deciding to focus solely on the Alzheimer’s study, Mardiros volunteered concurrently in three psychology labs. “I was approaching my senior year and still wasn’t sure exactly which aspect of the field I wanted to go into,” she explains. “I felt the hands-on experience would help me to decide.” Indeed, it did. Not only has she decided to major in psychobiology, she has since given talks to incoming students, encouraging them to engage in research to help them chart their course. “You get a much more complete understanding of what’s going on.”
Similarly, Jane Chung’s experience in 1993 as an SRP volunteer in the cardiothoracic surgery laboratory of Dr. Hillel Laks afforded her a rare window into what the premed student could expect if she continued in medicine in the future. Though she was considering medical school, Chung says that before her SRP experience, she “was lost.”
“I didn’t know any doctors, residents or medical students,” says Chung. “So I had no idea what to expect. Doing research, I got to know a lot of people who became role models. I could see what their lives were like and ask them about their career decisions. I received a lot of good advice.” Two years later, she entered Loma Linda University Medical School, confident that she wanted to become a physician.
Calysta Watson, a freshman anth-ropology major who has already decided to pursue a Ph.D. in cultural archaeology, spent last winter and spring quarters in the Channel Islands laboratory of UCLA’s Institute of Archaeology, classifying and analyzing artifacts left behind by the Chumash Indians which were derived from excavations on the islands from 1988 to 1994. Though her tasks were specific, Watson says the study’s principal investigator, Jeanne Arnold, and the lab’s graduate students made sure she absorbed the larger implications of what she was doing. With that encouragement, Watson found herself becoming far more inquisitive in the research setting than in the classroom. “You learn about all of the details,” she says. “I’m always asking, ‘What does this mean? What were you trying to do here? What were your goals when you did this?’”
Besides involving students in hands-on research, students found that SRP also helps to break down barriers — real or perceived — that often exist between students and faculty in the less personal lecture setting. “A lot of students think of professors as ivory-tower untouchables,” says Juan Vasquez, a senior majoring in economics and Latin American studies. “But by getting to work more closely with them, you realize that’s not the case. You can have conversations with them, ask them how they got to where they are, how they became interested in what they’re doing. In the classroom, it would be out of place to ask professors, ‘Where did you go to school?’ When you’re doing research alongside of them, it’s easy.”
Vasquez, who intends to pursue an M.B.A. after gaining workplace experience, has volunteered for the program for four quarters, the past two of which he assisted Joseph Ostroy, professor of economics, in Ostroy’s research of Standard and Poor’s ratings and what they indicate about the economy. With the up-close attention, Vasquez says, he learned to think more critically, to test other researchers’ conclusions rather than accepting them as fact, and to look at the larger trends suggested by data.
One of SRP’s major areas of focus is to point more students from traditionally underrepresented ethnic groups toward a research career. To help, funds provided by the University of California Office of the President are used to offer stipends — $2,000 for two quarters of service — to a certain number of students from these groups. The result has been a dramatic increase in SRP participation by students eligible for the stipend — larger, even, than the number of stipends allocated each year, since many of the students who unsuccessfully apply have had their interest sufficiently piqued that they participate as a volunteer regardless.
“We’re very concerned that the research universities in this country are simply not producing very many Ph.D.s of color, and we want to help change that,” says Associate Vice Chancellor Raymund Paredes, whose office oversees the funds. In that sense, the program is on the right track: Paredes’ data indicate that approximately 80 percent of the students who participate in research at the undergraduate level go on to graduate school.
Omar Farouk will raise that percentage. Farouk, unlike most students, had decided on academic research as a career goal even before becoming involved in SRP. He transferred to UCLA from California State University, Northridge, precisely for the opportunity to gain exposure to research. But financial pressures forced him to work, leaving him no time to participate in SRP. “It was frustrating to be here and not take advantage of the research opportunities on campus,” says Farouk, who was unaware at the time he could be eligible for a stipend.
But without formal training or guidance, Farouk, a senior history and Latin American studies major, nonetheless spent breaks from school conducting his own scholarly pursuit of “third-roots studies,” delving into the historical contributions of the non-Spanish, non-indigenous peoples of Latin America. In Mexico, he asserts, the national image of mestizo subsumes descendants of other cultures — primarily African, Asian and Jewish — and effectively ignores their heritage. “When people look at me phenotypically, they categorize me as African American,” says Farouk, whose family is from Cuba. “But that’s only part of the story.”
During a discussion with History Professor Juan Gomez-Quinones, Farouk was surprised to learn the professor had been approached by other students about the same topic. Thus was born the Multi-Cultural Mexican-African-California Project, with the goal of “exploring, documenting and broadcasting” the shared African-Mexican heritage, partly to build bridges and promote positive interaction among African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. At about the same time Gomez-Quinones was developing the proposal, Farouk learned about the SRP stipend. His application was accepted.
“This project has taught me how to be an historian,” Farouk explains. “When I went to Mexico on my own I would grope. I didn’t know how to approach people, how to effectively use archives, collect oral histories and pursue topics in a scholarly manner. I now have much more insight into what it means to do research.”
So far 750 faculty members have volunteered to sponsor SRP students, who get a listing of their names, office numbers, telephone extensions and a brief description of their research interests. Many, says Alpers, volunteer out of a personal sense of obligation. “They believe this is an important thing to do,” he says. “Alumni and parents of undergraduates often ask us, ‘Why do you emphasize that UCLA is a research university? Why is that so important?’ The faculty know the answers, and they want to make sure undergraduates benefit from the research environment.”
Some faculty members, as it turns out, are recruited into the program by students who are dismayed at the absence of their favorite professor from the listing of faculty participants. When approached about volunteering, many faculty are all too happy to join a program they might not have given much thought to before. “There’s an element of flattery to it,” Alpers says.
Whether their research effort is advanced by the students they take on depends both on the type of investigation and the quality of the student who volunteers. Inevitably, there are students whose motivation is solely to become close enough to a faculty member to receive a letter of recommendation for graduate school. “If they’re doing it for superficial reasons, they end up wasting your time,” Gonzalez says.
And even in the case of the most dedicated student, teaching and training means investing a great deal of effort, often without an equal return in productivity. Alpers believes that the research model used by the sciences, in which graduate and postdoctoral students can provide the hands-on help, may be the best way to integrate undergraduates into a research project. Edgerton, whose laboratory fits that description, nonetheless points out that he can’t afford to take on SRP students who don’t contribute at a certain level. His solution has been to ask that they make a long-term commitment so that the initial training time isn’t wasted.
Not that faculty participation is always altruistic. In many cases, SRP students go on to become successful independent researchers, collaborating with the faculty member who takes them on. And there are personal rewards. Gonzalez relishes the excitement of having an inquisitive mind in her midst. “That enthusiasm and curiosity keeps us on top of things when it comes to education,” she says.
Aguirre agrees. “It’s easy for faculty to become removed from undergraduates at a large university such as UCLA,” he says. “To have an ongoing relationship with students about your research is rewarding. It gives you an opportunity to share the wonder of discovery with people who then become caught up in what you’re doing. You can actually see them making their own connections, and that’s exciting. By becoming involved, they learn that research can be arduous and unglamorous, but also that there is real pleasure in finding out things that were not previously known.”
— D.G.
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