Running a Lab with Undergraduates Posted on February 16, 2006 Barbara H. Fiese (bio) describes how her career has been enriched by having undergraduate students in her lab.

One of the real joys that I have in running an active laboratory is involving undergraduates in research, and I've been doing this from the very first year that I started as an assistant professor. I was so surprised when one of the more senior faculty members said, "Well, you know if you want you can ask an undergraduate to work in your lab." I thought this is wonderful, and they get course credit. I run a lab every year and I have between 6 and 8 undergraduates working with me. What we do is I try to get students to spend at least one year in the lab. For most of the work that we do, by the time that I get them trained up it takes almost a full semester, and if they leave I really do not think that they have the benefits of it. So we run our weekly lab meeting with the undergraduates. Some of the graduate students participate in that as well. We identify topics that we are interested in they might be interested in, or I see something that just came out and say, "I really think we need to take a look at that," and it could range from professional journal articles to something I saw in the newspaper that's relevant to our study.

We then talk about the different things that we find in the studies and try to link it back to the actual work that they are doing. And what I have them do, they do transcribing and they do some data entry, and I try to tell them research is not all glorious and glamorous, that there are some real signs of drudge work that they have to do, but as long as they feel like they are contributing that works out very well. We have an annual poster session in our department, and they prepare posters for the presentation, and they make presentations at the poster sessions, and I've also had undergrads go to SRCD and other professional conferences where it is really exciting for them to get in on the early stages of their development. It has just been a wonderful experience for me. Some of them go on to graduate school, but a lot of them don't, and I think the skills that they learn in terms of working on a team as well as just the basic data management computing kinds of skills do well for them down the road because they kind of can just ease into different kinds of organizations.

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