First Year Scholar: Faculty Involvement

Create A First Year Scholar Opportunity

In order to create robust undergraduate experiences, the First Year Scholars Program will fund and support faculty guides to play an active role in scaffolding research opportunities for first-time undergraduate students within their discipline area and provide active mentorship to students engaging in applied and basic research and scholarly activity. Faculty mentors will play an active role in mentoring first-year undergraduate students through all aspects of the research/scholarly activity process, including design of activities, nurturing proper techniques, data collection and analysis, reporting, and publication and presentation of research findings.

Benefits of Involvement:

  • Stipend
  • Training on serving a diverse student population
  • Opportunity to introduce undergraduate students to undergraduate research
  • Assistance provided to enhance current research

Expectations for Involvement:

  • 10 -week commitment (minimum)
  • Faculty will be part of a culturally responsive mentoring training (2 hours)
    • Students will be part of a “this is what a researcher look like…”training that focuses on naming and challenging imposter syndrome for the student to claim their identity as a researcher
    • Faculty-guided research groups consisting of 2 – 5 first-year undergraduate students will be established on research that faculty members have already begun
  • Faculty guides will play an active role in mentoring first year undergraduate students through all aspects of the research process, including: research design, nurturing proper research and laboratory techniques, data collection and analysis, reporting, and publication and presentation of research findings.
  • Mandatory attendance and participation in a Fall Kickoff Meeting (tbd) and participation
  • Faculty will facilitate weekly meetings with their student research team
  • Faculty and students will maintain regular communication with MURALS team
    • Graduate student will be assigned to help with logistics and resources
  • Faculty will guide students through a meaningful experience* resulting in the contribution to data-driven results

* Meaningful Experience: the students are the driving force behind experimental design/project design, implementation of the methods to collect data, data analysis, presentation design, and oral communication of the results