In the course of doing some graduate admissions and writing many rec
letters, I've been thinking about the value of undergrad research
experiences. There is no question that doing one or more reasonably big
science research projects can be of real benefit to undergrads in
multiple ways. Most importantly, the student gets to see how real
research works - it's very different from problem set exercises and
canned labs where you know that there's a well-defined answer or
solution. The student also gets in-depth experience in a particular
subfield, so that they can get a sense of whether that's a specific area
they might (or might not) like to study further. In my case, my
senior thesis helped me appreciate that I didn't really want to do
computational modeling exclusively. It's also good for students to see
how much effort really goes into a big project, and gives them
experience (ideally) in budgeting their time, planning, making
presentations, structuring and writing a lengthy document, etc. We've
recently had a really nice insight into some mysterious data coming from
an undergrad project in my lab, and it's been very fun to go through
the process, with the student, of figuring out what the heck is going
on, and to have the student come by my office with the confirming data
in-hand.
Sometimes undergrad research can also lead to big scientific results. Here is a paper (see press release) by Dave Hall's group
at Amherst College, where they have used ultracold atoms to create
(effective) magnetic monopoles. Note that this work was done at a
liberal arts college by undergrad researchers. Outstanding!
5 comments:
"... the value of undergrad research experiences." MILGROM needs undergrads — they might look at experimental evidence objectively. I quote Pavel Kroupa from a (Nov. 1, 2011) e-mail, “My criticism is not based on me not liking dark matter, but is a result of rigorous hypothesis testing such that, from a strictly logical and scientific point of view, LCDM is definitely not a viable model of cosmological reality. I do not write such statements because I do not like LCDM and its
ingredients, but because every test I have been involved with falsifies LCDM. At the same time, the tests of MOND we performed were done on
the same footing as the LCDM tests. The MOND tests yield consistency so far. I am not more "fond" of MOND or any other alternative, but the scientific evidence and the logical conclusions cannot be avoided. And it is true, I must concede, that MOND has an inherent beauty which must be pointing at a deeper description of space time and possibly associated quantum mechanical effects which we do not yet understand (compare with Kepler laws and the later Newtonian dynamics).” The gurus of general relativity theory debate firewalls, while Milgrom, Kroupa, Pawlowski, and McGaugh find evidence showing that Newton-Einstein gravitational theory is not 100% correct. UNDERGRADS TO THE RESCUE of Milgrom's non-relativistic MOND ...
I wonder how these (effective) magnetic monopoles compare to the (effective) magnetic monopoles in a magnetized plasma. Would make for an interesting conversation with Anthony Chan, I suspect.
It seems that the first author of the Amhearst paper is a postdoc, not an undergrad.
http://www3.amherst.edu/~mray/index
To be fair, the Amherst work was done with a postdoc as well as an undergrad, and Amherst is a unique place: $1.8bn under management, gobs of grant funding, < 2000 students and a few hundred faculty. Typical undergrad research it ain't.
Yes, I had missed that the first author on that paper is a postdoc, and Bob is right that Amherst is an upper echelon small liberal arts college. However, I do find it impressive what Dave Hall has managed to build up there, using largely undergrad researchers, and with the level of research resources available. Certainly when I was looking at jobs, the kind of research startup package offered by places like Amherst was at most about 1/3 of what a competitive research university could put together, and the expectation was to be teaching at least 2 courses per semester if not 3.
Post a Comment