REU Efforts

Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Programs

Information on The Bonds program and past participants can be found here.

The process of becoming educated does not just occur in a classroom. REAL experiences are essential and REUs are meaningful ways to do this. I have served as a faculty mentor (and coPI on a NSF REU Site "Chemistry - Chemical Engineering: The Bonds Between Us" because I firmly believe that engagement of students in real research increases the likelihood of retention through bachelor degree programs and therefore the likelihood of matriculation into graduate programs. For example, I have mentored 20 undergraduate students (7 REU participants) in the past 5 years, which have included three students who have won awards at regional and national meetings for their research projects. Of those 20 students, 8 are African-American, 11 are female, and 6 have already entered graduate school (link to Group Members page). Further, 10 of the students have contributed as co-authors on 7 unique publications (published, submitted, or in draft form), and 20 unique presentations (please see CV).

An experience that enables an undergraduate student to immerse himself or herself in research can be a life-changing experience. Exit evaluations and discussions with participants often indicate that the participants are surprised when their projects don’t work perfectly in line with the objectives they were assigned at the beginning of the summer (unlike the “cookbook” undergraduate lab classes they’ve previously experienced). A previous REU participant summarized this feeling in his / her exit evaluation as, “It's called re-search - things fail, and you are supposed to try again. Otherwise it would just be called search.”

While this experience is invaluable, it is possible to improve this process. In the current REU model, participants delve deeply into a single research topic and approach that topic according to the valuable guidance of their faculty and graduate student mentors. At the end of the experience, their perspective of research is one with a narrow focus and significant depth (a microperspective). The experience would be much more enriching if it also included a component which would demonstrate the breadth of research (macroperspective). If this “big picture” component also empowered the student to contribute to generating ideas and strategies to approach a futuristic research problem, their resulting perspective and related skills would be that much more versatile.

For this reason, another REU enthusiast (Dr. Giselle Thibaudeau) and I teamed up to propose an REU Site which seeks to facilitate participant experiences in research that encompass the depth of a research project as well as the breadth of possibilities in the research field. The plan is to adapt a multidimensional learning tool known as the Jigsaw Method. In this method, students are trained as experts on separate topics such that each student demonstrates a unique skill set. Students with unique, yet compatible skills are then grouped together and asked to problem solve through a task (called Jigsaw Challenges). Within this team, each member contributes according to their expertise thus enabling the team to approach a problem that individual students could not. Project summary for the 2007 proposal (which was not funded) is available here.