Research Early, Research Often

Inside Higher Ed has an article about a HHMI initiative to encourage more students to pursue science careers:

Until now, calls for action to bolster Americans’ science aptitude and increase the number of graduates who move on to scientific research have focused on nurturing individual students, improving teacher education and collaborating with industry, among other approaches. The Hughes initiative, called the Science Education Alliance, is a more coordinated effort aimed at piquing the interest of students who might not otherwise consider science as a career, inculcating skills that can later benefit even those who don’t and supporting a network of institutions that could eventually help professors improve their methods of teaching.

“If there's one thing that's emerging from all the work that we do,” said Daryl E. Chubin, director of the Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it’s that “an undergraduate research experience is the way to hook students into thinking about science as a career.”

Part of the idea is to place students’ research experiences as early as possible in their academic careers, in some cases before they even declare a major. While it is widely accepted that such experiences improve students’ likelihood of pursuing science, the Hughes program’s emphasis on an “earlier the better” approach is unconventional.

This is a real point of emphasis for my department-- we had close to 20 students in our summer research program this past summer, and each of the past three (links to past summers are at the bottom of the page). Those students were from all levels, too-- I had one rising senior getting a start on his thesis, a rising junior, and a rising sophomore, and as a department, we had four rising sophomores, and one student who hadn't even started at Union yet.

This has been a common practice for us, and it's paid off. We've kept a lot of students as majors by encouraging them to get involved in research early on, and many of those students are among our very best. It's not uncommon for students in our department to spend two or even three summers on campus working with faculty-- if you go back through those student research pages, you'll see some of the same faces over and over.

It takes some work-- don't believe the guy who says that " after a year in the lab,... undergraduates are often 'virtually indistinguishable from the graduate students'"-- but the experience is great for the students, and it's good for the health of our department. We've got a very large number of Physics majors for a small college-- the national median was three, the last time I looked, and we've graduated 22 in the last two years, with 15 seniors this year-- and undergrad research plays a big part in that.

The Inside Higher Ed article is specifically about a program in biomedical research, but I think the central idea is more broadly applicable. I would really like to see some physical science organizations launching similar initiatives-- it's not like there's a real shortage of pre-meds and bio majors, after all, but something to draw more good students into physics would be a big help.