Involving Students in Research Posted on November 15, 2007 Eric A. Youngstrom (bio) highlights some challenges in employing students on research projects.

So the question of how do you involve students in research is a fantastic one, and it’s a work in progress for me. If someone has a really good answer about how to do that, please refer them to me. For me, it’s a struggle.

The goal is definitely to have the students involved and have them learning and developing skills and developing their careers. And what I would love to see happen is have people feel like they had good learning experiences that continue to support them through whatever they decide to do. And I also need to make sure that the work gets done.

It’s been very hard to have the students be able to find a full day that fits around the courses and the clinical training and all of the other obligations. And so it creates this bind where you want to support the students and have them involved, but you also need to get the work done. And so we’ve wound up over the years experimenting with a lot of different hybrid models where the students will be involved in pieces of the training.

Still involved enough to understand the big picture and using it to leverage training opportunities and research opportunities, but they can’t be in a mission-critical role, because it’s not realistic at their level of development and also at the time that they have and the competing demands on that time.

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