When you give a college student a choice between a summer full of lazy mornings languishing on the couch or a summer of getting up early to engage in scientific research in a full-fledged lab, the choice might seem easy.
However, at Washington University and other schools across the country, there are numerous undergraduates taking advantage of summer research opportunities. The University has a long tradition of undergraduate participation in research, one developed further by programs created by Sarah Elgin, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, of biochemistry and molecular biophysics in the School of Medicine and of education in Arts & Sciences, with financial support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
Elgin has spent her career as a genomic biologist at the University often embracing those individuals who are not usually a part of scientific research and creating scientific research opportunities for them. She continues to participate in a program that places approximately 35 fellows in a university lab to do summer research.
Elgin believes that the goal of education is to learn “how knowledge is created in a discipline,” and a summer research opportunity is the first step to achieving this goal.
Elgin spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis.
In an attempt to evaluate the efficacy of the summer science research program, Elgin looked to a collaborative national effort. With additional grant funding from HHMI, she developed a collaborative group to work with David Lopatto, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Grinnell College, who created an online assessment tool for the undergraduate summer research participants to take after their research experience.
In its first year, 1,135 students participated in the online survey. The second year brought approximately 2,000 students’ participation.
What Elgin and Lopatto discovered is that the summer research program is not only working, but it is also acting as a confirmatory event in many of these students’ lives. The majority of students responded that they had been planning a career in the sciences and that the summer experience confirmed their desire to pursue such a career. Interestingly, the 4 percent of students who decided to change their future career plans from science to another field was equaled by the percentage of students who changed career plans from a nonscience field to one of a scientific bent.
Additionally, through the national collaboration, Elgin and her colleagues were able to look for differences and similarities between collegiate and university summer internship programs.
Through the online survey results, they determined that the quality of mentoring at both types of institutions is similar. Moreover, males and females as well as minorities all have similarly positive experiences in summer research programs, regardless of institution type.
“At a college level, generally the major professor of the lab is also the ‘bench’ mentor, meaning that the professor instructs the summer interns in appropriate techniques throughout their research experience,” Elgin said. “However, at a university level, the major professor provides oversight, but is unlikely to be the ‘bench’ mentor — most likely the postdocs and current graduate students will be mentoring the summer intern at the bench.”
An important bonus is that there seems to be an increase in self-reported independent learning throughout the following fall and spring semesters in students who engaged in the summer research internships.
“All of this is supportive of the idea that it is important to engage students in summer undergraduate research opportunities,” Elgin said. “It helps students realize themselves as contributors — as investigators — in their field.”
As the HHMI grant progresses and comes up for renewal, Kathy Miller, Ph.D., professor of biology, the WUSTL program director, and her colleagues will be adding some key components, such as organized “mentoring” training for graduate students and postdocs. The training will not only allow graduate students and postdocs at the University level to learn to be effective mentors to the summer research students, but also give them an opportunity to evaluate their position as “mentees” of the principal investigator of their labs.
Overall, Elgin and her colleagues have successfully created summer programs in which undergraduate students can discover, from their own efforts, how knowledge is created in science — and thus are working to build a scientific work force with early confirmation that science can be fun, interesting and incredibly rewarding, even more so than a summer spent on the couch.