There’s an invisible barrier between faulty and students. We get that. It’s what we are trying to overcome with re|course: the distance between faculty and students.

Thomas Siegmund

Thomas Siegmund presented in ME290 today, and he learned again that students see a high barrier to reaching out to faculty and even starting a conversation about undergraduate research opportunities.

So how do we overcome this barrier?

The students suggested that faculty come to them in regular classes and present their research. By taking a few minutes inside the regular class schedule,  students can learn about faculty research interests and begin exploring what interests them.

A web research hub will be helpful, but not enough

So, this insight is important. It suggest that making faulty research interests available though a new ME research hub will help, but it will not be sufficient.

Faculty can do more by coordinating among themselves and setting aside relatively small slivers of class time to expose students to related research underway by ME faculty. We’ll take these insight back to the re|course Undergraduate Research team. These insights will help us as we design our experiments to figure out what works to expand undergraduate research experiences.