Williams College Summer Science Research Programs Engage 150 Students

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 10, 2003–For students who want to go on in science or mathematics, research experience is a necessary component of their undergraduate education. Graduate schools look for students familiar with the pace and focus of work in a research setting; they want applicants who have made a strong intellectual commitment to a research project, those who show promise of dedication to their discipline.

A number of Williams’ summer programs introduce students to the research experience and encourage development of the skills integral to a scientific career. Examples of these include the summer student-faculty research program in the sciences and the SMALL program in mathematics. (The letters in “SMALL” are the first initials of the last names of the faculty who first founded the program in 1987.)

The student-faculty research program attracts about 150 Williams students each year. Two or three students work with each participating faculty member. The SMALL program, on the other hand, is open to students from other campuses as well, and usually accepts about 20 students, and three or four students work with each faculty member.

In the research laboratories, the student’s role changes from student to colleague. Whereas the course labs are prescribed to illustrate the curriculum, original research exposes the student to unlimited possibility.

“What we try to do in the labs is to introduce students to techniques, as well as the theory behind those techniques,” said Lee Park, chair and professor of chemistry. “In the summer programs, students in the research labs make different kinds of decisions from those they makein a teaching lab, and the array of choices open is so much greater.”

Over the course of the summer, faculty work with students to develop their confidence and encourage them to start making their own decisions in the experimental process.

Steven Scroggins ’04 from St. Paul, Minn., for example, first worked one summer in Park’s on manipulating liquid crystals and metal complexes. He then participated in the undergraduate summer science research program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s National Science Foundation-Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, looking to build compounds that display certain physical properties such as magnetism or conductivity in only one dimension.

Work in a research laboratory places many demands on a student’s critical thinking skills. Charles Lovett, the Philip and Dorothy Schein Professor of Chemistry, said, “It’s often the case that experiments yield unexpected results and it’s up to the student to prove that the results are reproducible. Then the student and the faculty advisor try to interpret the results in the form of a hypothesis that can be tested with further experiments.”

Park agrees: “The best thing a student can bring to the lab is to be open-minded about learning something about research rather than a very specific thing within the research.”

While the summer research program in the sciences often has students working independently on individual pieces of a larger research question, the SMALL math program encourages students to work together in groups of about three or four to a professor.

“I think having a cohort of people really helps, especially when you’re initially experiencing research,” said Colin Adams, the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics. “Research &endash; mathematics in particular &endash; can be very daunting. In mathematics, sometimes you can hit a wall and you don’t know what to do, and it helps so much to have people to talk to about it, who are trying different things, who are saying ‘Have you tried this? Have you tried that?’ Working in a group encourages students to bounce ideas off of each other, and the dynamic is much like the constant experimentation in a science research laboratory.”

The ethos behind such undergraduate research programs, faculty agree, is to give students an idea of what they may expect in a scientific career – an experiment in their futures, in addition to organic compounds and knot theory. “The sooner you can get students to experience research, to experiment and try whether or not this is the way they would like to potentially live their lives, the better,” said Adams.

Scroggins, doing research in chemistry at the University of Minnesota this summer, said, “I am very excited about this opportunity primarily because of the experiences I’ve had in research at Williams. My research lab opportunities have made me sure that going into research is the right career path for me.”

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Published July 10, 2003