The College of Arts & Sciences has announced the formation of an office to help promote undergraduate research projects.
The Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) will help place students in research positions, promote their findings and award scholarships.
“The office was started with the hope of really promoting undergraduate research for students in all areas,” said Henry Biggs, Ph.D., associate dean in Arts & Sciences and director of the Office of Undergraduate Research. “The natural sciences have some great programs already, but we’d love to develop the social sciences and humanities more than we have in the past.
“I see this office as being a central place for students to locate research opportunities and a way for us to facilitate the undergraduate research experience.”
Biggs said a centralized database of positions will be a valuable asset in matching students to positions, thus removing at least one of the obstacles that keep willing students from finding vacant openings.
While research and laboratory work are commonplace in the sciences, Biggs said students from all disciplines will find the database useful. It will list research positions from a wide variety of academic areas, including the humanities.
The searchable online database is at ur.wustl.edu and lists 190 current research opportunities. Biggs said the database will be updated often.
OUR staff expects to move into a new office in Prince Hall by March 1. With the formation of the office, several initiatives have been planned — the Undergraduate Research Digest, the Undergraduate Research Symposium and a series of research scholarships to be awarded this spring.
The digest will be a collection of undergraduate research projects posted on the OUR Web site. It will include submissions from a variety of fields.
“The idea of the digest is to promote what is out there,” Biggs said. “I think a lot of the research done by undergraduate students is not getting the recognition it deserves.
“There is major research being done that nobody knows about, and we’d like that to be revealed a little bit more to the undergraduate student body, to the WUSTL community and to the outside public as well. It also gives students a chance to understand what’s required in publishing an article and what needs to be done to communicate to an audience.”
The Undergraduate Research Symposium will be March 21-23 and will provide students a chance to briefly describe their research through posters and visual presentations. The symposium will be divided into a day of presentations on each of three fields: humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Applications for the symposium will be accepted until Feb. 14.
OUR will also award a series of scholarships this spring, ranging from $300-3,000. Students conducting work in any field are invited to apply and have their proposals reviewed by a departmental committee.
The deadline for scholarship applications is Feb. 25. Students will be notified by March 11 if they are accepted.
“There is no question that if a student can show a potential employer that they have a published article in a journal and they have presented their work before their peers and professors, it really gives them quite an edge in getting hired,” Biggs said. “We think the digest and the symposium will give students presentation and communication skills that go far beyond work done in their particular field.”
For more information, go online to ur.wustl.edu.