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U495V·SUNDAY WORKSHOP: Approaches and Best Practices in Mentoring Undergraduate Research
Workshop Sponsored Workshops
Sun. June 23, 2024 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
A106, Oregon Convention Center
Session Description

Ticketed event: Approaches & Best Practices - $20.00
Undergraduate Research (UR) has garnered attention as a high-impact educational practice to recruit and retain students, often a focus in university outreach and recruitment campaigns. While benefits to students are well studied, advantages to faculty mentors are less studied, and their time commitment is often not formally incentivized. This workshop will offer approaches for faculty to employ UR experiences towards their own research goals while benefiting their students and institution. Success depends on strategic planning of the project; goals of the mentor, students, and institution; and clear agreement on expectations.

As undergraduate research has grown more prevalent, some colleges and universities have created formal mechanisms, such as funded summer programs. Even within those programs, the student experience usually fits into one of four models:
• faculty-generated and faculty-mentored project
• instructor-led, course-based group mentoring and/or group research project
• graduate student project assistant
• student-generated project with faculty mentorship.
We will explore advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and then focus on the first two, which involve the most faculty effort, but arguably the most student benefit.

In engineering and other STEM disciplines, UR projects usually fall within the research program of the faculty mentor, who benefits from additional assistance to collect data for grant proposals and papers. This advantage is best realized through a strong, active relationship, requiring mentor time commitment. Best practices for effective mentoring include:
• planning projects tailored to student experience and constraints
• setting clear expectations to meet mentor, student, and institutional goals
• teaching technical skills, research methods, and disciplinary norms
• supporting professional development by one-on-one interaction
• fostering a community of faculty mentors and student researchers.
On an individual basis, these practices can be inefficient and perhaps untenable for a tenure-track faculty member. This workshop will provide faculty with best practices to efficiently manage their undergraduate research students.

The workshop organizers are also conducting research on the benefits and barriers to faculty to mentor undergraduate research. They have developed a tool for examining these questions. Initial efforts will focus on study participation by chemical engineering faculty. Through this workshop at ASEE, the organizers are seeking to expand survey participants to a wider engineering background.

Speakers
  1. Dr. Christy Wheeler West
    University of South Alabama

    Christy Wheeler West is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of South Alabama. She also serves as the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research for the university and as a member of the University Honors College Council.
    As Director of Undergraduate Research, Dr. Wheeler West oversees an interdisciplinary undergraduate research program with 60 fellows each summer. Admission to the program is competitive, and students submit research proposals for selection. During the summer, Dr. Wheeler West runs workshops that cover topics including reading and writing scholarly work, designing research posters, responsible conduct of research, and graduate school and fellowship application processes. Each fall, Dr. Wheeler West organizes an undergraduate research symposium and works with featured speakers on their presentations. She is also expanding her office’s efforts to include faculty development opportunities for undergraduate research mentors.
    Dr. Wheeler West is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research. She is currently the Chair of the Education Division of AIChE, working on programming for the Annual Meeting.

  2. Dr. Joseph H Holles
    New Mexico State University

    Joseph Holles is the Bob Davis Professor and Head of Chemical and Materials Engineering at New Mexico State University. Professor Holles has been a faculty member for 20 years and has previously published (in ASEE Proceedings and the journal Chemical Engineering Education) multiple peer-reviewed works in the area of mentoring graduate students for research, mentoring undergraduate students for research, research skills in research data management, and research ethics. This has also included pedagogical work to develop several courses on developing research skills.
    He is a member of the Council for Undergraduate Research (CUR) and have served as a reviewer for their Posters on the Hill program to have undergraduates present research at the U.S. Capital. He has served as reviewer multiple times for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Proposal (GRFP).
    He was previously Assistant Editor and is now an Associate Editor for the journal Chemical Engineering Education. He led the journal efforts to migrate to the latest version of the journal management software, obtain DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for the articles, revised the journal website to become visible to and indexed by Google Scholar, and developed the processes for the recently completed project to import 50 years of the journal back issues into the current journal website.