Our Values

The Undergraduate Research Program (URP) values:

Each student's individual learning path;
Research as a deep learning experience, which motivates understanding of basic concepts through their application to a real problem and helps students to develop a deeper understanding of more complex materials.

We provide students with:

A safe place for intellectual risk-taking;
Practice in formulating good questions;
Insight into the lives and work of faculty;
Confidence in themselves as creative participants in their fields;
An opportunity for active learning, rather than the passive reception of knowledge;
An opportunity to think about the relationships between knowledge and methods across disciplines.

We value undergraduate participation in research as a way to afford faculty members:

Naive, fresh points of view that may reveal new ways of seeing accepted ideas;
A sense of undergraduates as partners in uncovering new knowledge, rather than as the recipients of what the faculty member already knows;
The chance to communicate their joy and passion about their research to students;
An opportunity to bring new students into their fields.

We value the role that undergraduate research plays in relationship to:

Each student's overall undergraduate experience;
Classroom learning;
Personal growth and development of long term educational and career goals;
Building a community of student scholars;
Other kinds of experiential learning that allow students to extend and practice their learning.

We value the public presentation of each student's work as:

We value collaboration with faculty, departments, programs, and other institutions in support of student learning.