Undergrads hone research skills

LINCOLN — While many of her fellow college students sun themselves on beaches during spring break this week, Mari Pesek will be sifting through piles of cool, damp leaves, hunting wolf spiders.

Pesek became fascinated with the eight-legged critters, thanks in part to an unusual undergraduate research program that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln established 10 years ago.

Not only does the program, known as UCARE, pay Pesek for her research, it has helped hone her interests in biology and environmental studies.

“Working with spiders has taught me that I can work with a lot of different animals,” said Pesek, a senior from Brainard, Neb. “And maybe not the kinds of animals that you think are so cute and fuzzy.”

Her faculty mentor, Eileen Hebets, an assistant biology professor, came to UNL five years ago from the University of California-Berkeley, where she worked with a similar program.

She said such programs are relatively rare nationwide. “Undergrad research is really important, and it's often difficult to get undergrads in the lab if there isn't some incentive or a program like UCARE,” Hebets said.

Although most universities offer research programs for undergraduates, the students usually work as research assistants for faculty members and don't get financial support for independent projects.

If students do work on independent projects, they're treated as an additional teaching assignment for faculty members, said economics professor Rick Edwards, who helped design the UNL program when he was senior vice chancellor of academic affairs in 2000.

Nancy Hensel, executive director of the Council on Undergraduate Research in Washington, D.C., said the UNL program incorporates what many experts regard as the best practices for undergraduates to learn the ropes of academic research.

It combines teaching students how to do research and giving them a chance to apply what they learn to their own projects, she said.

“Students need to learn how to do research, and one of the ways to do it is to work with a faculty member on their research,” she said. “To have it formalized in a program (like UCARE) is really terrific.”

The program's official name is Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experience. It is financed in part through a trust fund established by PepsiCo Inc. when UNL gave it exclusive rights to sell soft drinks on campus in 1999.

UCARE receives about $400,000 from the PepsiCo trust fund each year, plus another $200,000 from the Program of Excellence Fund. Students are paid $2,000 per academic year.

After starting with 100 students and 100 faculty members, about 450 students and more than 280 faculty members now participate in UCARE, said Laura Damuth, director of UNL undergraduate research.

“If you think about the benefit for students, it's huge,” she said. “They're delving deeper in their field of study, and faculty are developing future researchers in their field.”

From the start, UCARE has been open to all disciplines, faculty members and colleges. Usually about half the projects are in laboratory science and the others in liberal arts.

Projects typically last two years.

During the first year, undergraduates work on faculty projects.

During the second year, students typically do their own research projects, guided by faculty mentors.

Pesek wanted to add more research experience to her resume after switching her major from biology to environmental studies during her sophomore year.

She landed in UCARE after spending more than a year assisting graduate student Kasey Fowler-Finn, who was studying wolf spiders in Mississippi.

While Fowler-Finn focused on the way the spiders moved about and their courtship practices, Pesek grew interested in how some male spiders had big black brushes on their forelegs while others did not.

Fowler-Finn helped Pesek develop an experiment on whether the spiders' foreleg brushes inhibited their ability to forage.

Pesek applied for UCARE assistance in February 2009, during her junior year and was assigned Hebets as a mentor.

Pesek's UCARE project will last only one year because she will graduate, though she plans to continue her research. Pesek is applying to graduate schools to study ecology.

University officials believe all graduates should have research experience.

“One of the best ways to develop future scientists is to engage undergraduates,” Edwards said.

World-Herald staff writer Leslie Reed contributed to this report.

Contact the writer:

444-1304, news@owh.com.

« Metro/Region

Share