Undergraduate Research Participation

Department of Chemistry, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. Supported by the National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participation Grant during the summer of 1964 and National Science Foundation Grant No. G-19490. 

Received January 17, 1972. Work supported in part by the National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participant Program. 

This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (GB-27490 and PCM-75-21183), the National Institute of Health Biomedical Sciences Support Services (5507-RR07131) to Oakland University, and the National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participation Program. 

The authors would like to thank Diane K. Rindt for the x-ray diffraction work and Arthur L. Severson for x-ray fluorescence analysis. Mr. Roaldson acknowledges support from Associated Western Universities, Inc., as part of their summer undergraduate research participation program. 

Department of Chemistry, California State University Fresno, Fresno, Calif. 93740. The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of the National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participation Program (Grant GY-9916) and the California State University, Fresno Research Committee and Stenographic Service Center. 

Current affiliation Albany Molecular Research, Inc., Albany, New York, U.S.A. Undergraduate research participant. 

Hathaway R., Nagda B., Gregerman S. 2002. The relationship of undergraduate research participation to graduate and professional education pursuit an empirical study. Journal of College Student Dev., 43(5) 614-631. 

The author acknowledges the contributions of the many undergraduate chemistry majors, who through special problems, senior research or summer research participation have assisted his study of polysulfide chemistry. Generous support for their work was provided by the Sterling-Winthrop Research Institute. The author also acknowledges the receipt of a NYS/UUr Experienced Faculty Travel Award in support of his participation in the symposium on Geochemistry of Sulfur in Fossil Fuels. 

Vince S. C. Yeh received his B.S. degree (1994) from the University of British Columbia where he participated in undergraduate research under the late Professor L. Weiler. He completed Ph.D. (2001) from the University of Alberta under the guidance of Professor D. L. J. Clive, where he studied the asymmetric syntheses of alkaloids. After postdoctoral research (2003) with Professor B. M. Trost at Stanford University on asymmetric aldol catalysts, he joined Abbott Laboratories as a senior research chemist working in the area of metabolic diseases. His research interests include drug discovery, asymmetric synthesis, and natural products. 

Our research project on the Diels-Alderase has been achieved in collaboration with three groups. Prof. H. Oikawa (Organic Chemistry), Prof M. Honma (Biochemistry), and Prof I. Tanaka (X-ray Chrysta-llography) in Hokkaido University. We are also grateful to all those graduate and undergraduate students participated with this difficult project. The research is also supported by grants from the Ministry of... 

The reason for the success of these programs lies in the early experience of undergraduate students at their home institutions. Research participation coupled with motivation from their mentors helps these students to decide their career direction and their relative capabilities for discovery. They begin their industrial experience well prepared in laboratory techniques and with instrumentation, and questions that have fermented in their minds about relevance and opportunities -... 

Benefits. Design clinics are funded by industrial sponsors for a faculty-student team to solve a particular problem for the sponsor. The participating students usually are paid to work on the real-world problem. Students have all the benefits of an undergraduate research experience project but work on a problem more on the development side than the research side. 

In some upper-level courses and in undergraduate research laboratories, students start to participate in the design of laboratory experiments, usually under the watchful eye of an instructor or research mentor. For these experiences, it is very important to consider the safety of a procedure in the process of designing a new experiment. 

The goals for recruiting undergraduate researchers for this project were three-fold. First, due to the complexity of the experimental test series, it was desirable to recruit additional team members to contribute to model construction, experiment documentation, and data collection/analysis. Second, several graduate students participating on the project team had expressed... 

The undergraduates were not recruited to simply work as project technicians. Creating a structured learning experience for the participants represented a critical project objective. The undergraduate researcher... 

Assessment data was collected from six of the seven undergraduates who participated in the project. As noted later in this paper, these assessment results indicate that the undeigraduates valued their research experiences. 

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