| About the URP |
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:
- A completion step in the research process;
- A means by which to build a community of undergraduate scholars; and,
- A way to help students develop basic skills that are transferable.
We value collaboration with faculty, departments, programs, and other institutions in support of student learning.



