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Abstract As we build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture in the ecological research community, we must work to support new ecologists by empowering them with the knowledge, tools, validation, and sense of belonging in ecology to succeed. Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are critical for a student's professional and interpersonal skill development and key for recruiting and retaining students from diverse groups to ecology. However, few resources exist that speak directly to an undergraduate researcher on the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dimensions of embarking on a first research experience. Here, we write primarily for undergraduate readers, though a broader audience of readers, especially URE mentors, will also find this useful. We explain many of the ways a URE benefits undergraduate researchers and describe how URE students from different positionalities can contribute to an inclusive research culture. We address three common sources of anxiety for URE students through a DEI lens: imposter syndrome, communicating with mentors, and safety in fieldwork. We discuss the benefits as well as the unique vulnerabilities and risks associated with fieldwork, including the potential for harassment and assault. Imposter syndrome and toxic field experiences are known to drive students, including students from underrepresented minority groups, out of STEM. Our goal is to encourage all students, including those from underrepresented groups, to apply for UREs, build awareness of their contributions to inclusion in ecology research, and provide strategies for overcoming known barriers.
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Exploring Group Dynamics in a Group-Structured Computing Undergraduate Research Experience
While the computer science community has explored the importance of Undergraduate Research Experiences (UREs) and, separately, collaboration in computing (e.g. pair programming), little research has studied collaboration in the context of a URE. We performed a qualitative thematic analysis of how students collaborate within a group-structured, academic-year, inclusive computing URE catered towards second-year students at two large public research universities in the United States. We analyzed free-response and Likert-scale survey data collected early and late in the program from a total of 106 students who comprised three program cohorts. We studied their overall group function, what aspects of group work led to positive or negative group experiences, how their group affected their feelings of being supported, and how their group affected their sense of belonging in computing. We found that group experiences were overwhelmingly positive. Further, we found that students’ experiences in groups centered around three themes: group fit and belonging, emotional and academic support, and logistics. Within each theme, their experiences were rich and nuanced, and we observed variations by gender, and to a lesser degree by race. Our work suggests that group-structured UREs are both feasible and beneficial for students, and we give concrete suggestions for how to make these experiences successful.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821521
- PAR ID:
- 10355916
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 1
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 135 to 148
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP) was launched in 2014 at UC San Diego as a way to provide the benefits of research experiences to a large and diverse group of students early in their undergraduate computing career. ERSP is a structured program in which second-year undergraduate computing majors participate in a group-based, dual-mentored research apprenticeship over a full academic year. In its first four years ERSP engaged 139 students with a high proportion of women (68%) and racially minoritized students (19%), and participation in ERSP correlated with increased class grades. In 2018 we partnered with three additional universities to launch their own version of ERSP. Implementations at our partner sites have seen similar diversity and initial success, and have taught us how to implement the program in different contexts (e.g. quarters vs. semesters, different credit structures). This paper describes the structure of ERSP and how it can be adapted to different contexts to construct a scalable and inclusive research experience for early-career undergraduates in computing and related fields.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3501385.3543959
