Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake notes an article in Science about a survey of undergraduate research. The actual article is behind a paywall, but you can get access to the survey reports from SRI directly, which is even better.
The study finds a large number of benefits from undergraduate research, from increased confidence to improved knowledge of graduate school. Students who have done research are about twice as likely to pursue a Ph.D. as those who haven't, and the more research they do, the more likely they are to pursue careers in science.
The conclusion is strikingly simple, and I'll copy it wholesale from the Science article:
The large number and variety of students surveyed represented a variety of colleges and universities. Many types of undergraduate research experience fuel interest in STEM careers and higher degrees. No formulaic combination of activities optimizes the URO [Undergraduate Research Opportunity], nor should providers structure their programs differently for unique racial/ethnic minorities or women. Rather, it seems that the inculcation of enthusiasm is the key element--and the earlier the better. Thus, greater attention should be given to fostering STEM interests of elementary and high school students and providing UROs for college freshmen and sophomores.
The key thing is just getting students involved in research-- nothing else that they looked at is particularly correlated with the outcomes (at least not in a statistically significant way-- they say that "having a mix of mentors (in terms of their sex and race/ethnicity) is likely to have a mildly beneficial effect for all students, not just women and minorities"). Just the act of getting involved in a research project seems to produce beneficial effects, completely independent of any special additional efforts to encourage students from particular demographic groups. I think that's a really interesting and encouraging result.
So, if you know students who you'd like to see go into a career in science, get them involved in doing research. The sooner the better.
(Granted, that's easier said than done, from the faculty perspective, and I'll have more to say about that in a future post...)
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Professional management avoids risk. Funding peer review rejects everything innovative. Undergrad research support shakes loose money for pursuing high risk discovery. If it bombs the kid still gets trained in the art. If it succeeds the kid disappears in favor of Official Truth.
What was the name of the lab tech whose sloppy autoclave cleaning caused discovery of Ziegla-Natta olefin polymerization catalysts? It was two folks sharing that Nobel, not three.
"Students who have done research are about twice as likely to pursue a Ph.D. as those who haven't ..."
Of course, that may be because students increasingly need to have research experience to be competitive grad school applicants, rather than any enhanced inclination research gives them to pursue graduate studies. When I applied to grad school, it wasn't unusual to not have undergrad research experience, but nowadays it seems to be the norm.
Here (at least in the Physics department, I can't speak for the rest) doing research is pretty easy. I haven't done it yet, but pretty much anyone can get a grant (some Freshmen might miss out) for summer research. I'll be doing that next year, hopefully after working in a lab over the next school year.
I'm postponing judgments about a specialty and grad school until after I do some research, I think it would be foolish not to.
Of course, that may be because students increasingly need to have research experience to be competitive grad school applicants, rather than any enhanced inclination research gives them to pursue graduate studies.
Actually, what they claim is an increase in the number of students thinking that they would like to go to graduate school. From the Science article:
"Of respondents to the NSF follow-up survey, 29% had "new" expectations of obtaining a Ph.D.--that is, they reported that before they started college they did not expect to obtain a Ph.D., but now (at the time of the survey) they did expect to obtain one."
I generally enjoyed my old school but they sure ignored the undergrad (or did 25 years ago). I always felt when you went in to your advisor as a junior you ought to be asked where you would like to help in research. I don't care if it is 75% sweeping out the labs - all the undergraduate majors ought feel like they are a part of some of the research that is going on in the department. You would have to come in 10 hours a week and be invited to the boring meetings as well. Even if you didn't go on to graduate school this would help students by exposing them to group work dynamics that would be similar to any large corporation technical area. Professor who were lousy teachers might be good at coming up with jobs and goals or policing this so could contribute to undergraduate teaching.
Getting undergrads involved in research can be beneficial in the other direction as well: it's better to realize you don't want to do research for the rest of your life while you're still in college rather than halfway through grad school.
Right on. I've been saying this myself in terms of the value of publication for students. Some people question that we publish too much or that there is a lot of unreferenced cruft in the published record. Good! We don't publish just to teach people what we've learned, we publish as part of the process of learning it. We're academics so this should obviously be considered a good thing.
I suspect the causality runs the other way -- I think it is students with an inclination to careers in scientific research who are most likely to sign up for and profit from undergraduate research. When these students report that their level of interest increased, that's an increase from high to very high rather than from low to high.
I've noticed some faculty get a little carried away trying to draw as many students into the fold as possible, especially students who fit whatever agenda they have in mind (more women, more minorities, more very talented students, etc.) I hope this report isn't taken as a justification of this attitude. Up to a point it makes sense to tell people about opportunities they might not be aware of, but I think students who undertake these research programs without enough of their own motivation end up wasting their own and everyone else's time. The same goes for grad school.