UNDERGRADUATES
URAP Faculty discuss their approaches, and techniques for effective mentoring in their disciplines
Anne Cheng
(English)
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
(History of Art)
Renate Holub
(Interdisciplinary Studies)
Kenneth Weisinger
(Comparative literature and German)
See also: College of Letters and Science Award for Distinguished Research Mentoring of Undergraduates
ANNE CHENG started working with undergraduate research apprentices as a brand new assistant professor in English in Spring 1996. Now, she says, she wouldn't know what to do without them. She works with at least one apprentice each semester and calls the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program "an incredible resource" for research assistance.
The persistence of her apprentices shows that the benefits run both ways. Most stay for two semesters, and many for longer. One of her earliest apprentices, Becky Hsu, now works with Cheng as a graduate student in English.
It takes work to make the research relationship successful. Like many faculty in URAP, she did feel timid at first about giving students tasks. "I had to stop seeing it as a favor that students are doing for me. A good research mentor is a rare and valuable thing. I'm helping these students to develop intellectually and to build research skills."
The first step in building a productive research relationship is to have a good match of interest between faculty and apprentice. Cheng looks carefully at application statements to see if the would-be apprentices understand her research project. She selects students for interviews, and following a tip from colleague Sharon Marcus, asks each student to bring a bibliography of three items that the student thinks Cheng would find interesting. This quickly eliminates the students who are not ready to commit to real work, and it allows Cheng to see something of the students' intelligence and research instincts.
At that first meeting Cheng gives students a clear picture of the work they will do as apprentices, with examples of tasks. "You need to be really honest and specific with them," she recommends. "Students need to learn quickly that this is an important commitment and not just something they do 'on the side'." She finds it essential to meet with students every week to give them assignments. "We don't go into deep discussion every week, but once a month I do show them how the work they are doing fits into the larger project."
Kathleen Croghan, a philosophy major, appreciated that "Professor Cheng took time to explain the whole picture to me. By itself, the research was fun because it was a small challenge that I could feel satisfied by meeting. But it was much more rewarding to understand how each piece fit the larger project. I was very interested in both the racial grief and beauty strands [of Cheng's research] and it was helpful to see how she went about organizing the research and developing her theories."
Cheng's apprentices like the fact that her instructions are precise, although she will occasionally ask them to "root around a bit" on a particular topic "and see what's out there." And although the apprentices are clearly focused on Cheng's research, she tries to make links to their interests. When she learned of Croghan's interest in Samuel Beckett, she asked her to pursue issues in aesthetics that would benefit both of them. Croghan said, "She took time to talk to me about my interests and suggest ways of exploring them." Becky Hsu agreed, praising the professor's ability to put undergraduates "at ease, to make them feel intelligent and valued." Cheng's support of her research interests was critical: it helped make graduate school a thinkable option for her.
Undergraduates need more direction than graduate students, Cheng advises, but they are "fresh and eager" and "can do so much more than people expect." Cheng gives them plenty of guidance, and plenty of work. "The more they do the better they get." The loyalty of her apprentices, and their praise for her, shows how much they enjoy the challenge.
Cheng acknowledges her apprentices generously in her new book, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford, 2000). Three of them shared in her sense of accomplishment at the signing party in January. On the cover of the book is a photo of silent film star Anna May Wong that Becky Hsu uncovered as an undergraduate apprentice.
---from the L&S Gazette, Spring 2001 [return to top]
DARCY GRIGSBY (History of Art), who has served as a Faculty Mentor regularly since 1996, describes how her undergraduate researchers work both individually and as a team, contributing substantively to her research project:
Between 1996 and 1998, I sponsored four different undergraduate students who researched topics of their choice relevant to my first book, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Yale University Press, 2002). After discussion with me, each student selected, according to her or his interests, a particular research area, which was pivotal to my book. For example, some students researched slavery in Saint-Domingue; others, the reputation of Abbé Raynal; still another, the harem as a space of fantasy in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century France.
After familiarizing themselves with my research, the students compiled a bibliography of primary and secondary texts and an archive of visual images. Each student had a key to my office, a proxy library card, access to my xerox card, a filing cabinet drawer and a shelf in my office. I consider these young people to have been my collaborators in the preliminary stages of research for my book. We met periodically during the semester to discuss progress; we also communicated by notes left on their shelves. Since I have had undergraduate and graduate students working with me on a variety of problems, my office has been a busy and communal space.
I have also attempted to expose undergraduate students to scholarship and art beyond the confines of the campus. I took one Undergraduate Research Apprentice (who was in my Art and Colonialism class) to a Middle East Studies Association Conference in San Francisco where I gave a presentation. Twice my apprentices have received URAP summer stipends enabling them to continue research during the summer. One recipient of the summer stipend traveled with me to Paris and conducted further research there after I introduced her to libraries and museums. Another helped me during the concluding stages of my book production by communicating with French museum administrators and private collectors with the aim of locating artworks and acquiring photographs. This student also helped me compile a bibliography and list of sources for the seminar "Monuments and Ruins," which I taught in Fall 2001.
Since 1999, four other research apprentices have conducted research on problems pertinent to my second book, Colossal Monument, Colossal Engineering, Colossal Empire (a project that includes the Suez and Panama Canals, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower). Last semester, for example, a comparative literature major researched the role of the machine and industrial references in late nineteenth-century French poetry; an art history student researched the representation of sculpture studios and manufacture in late nineteenth-century France; another student compiled a bibliography on the photography of labor during the same period. (The latter student is now enrolled in an independent study course with me and is writing a paper on a related topic.)
---from the Townsend Center for the Humanities Newsletter for April/May 2002
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RENATE HOLUB, who directs the program in Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies (where she also teaches), explains how apprentice researchers played an important role in her research on Multicultural Europe:
Last summer, Wendy Vogt, a History major, was my apprentice, but Defne Ezgi, Marina McNee, and Jeff Jordan also worked with me (all four were readers for my class on Multicultural Europe, which enrolled 160 students and was cross-listed with Geography, History, International and Area Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies). My research also pertains to Multicultural Europe, examining the transformations taking place in Europe due to the formation of the European Union on the one hand, and migration flows into Europe on the other. Since migrants into Europe originate both in the East and the South, migration from the South in fact means migration from Muslim-majority countries.
Last summer, when I was studying primarily cultural aspects of the fact of migration in Europe, I was interested in cultural productions of immigrants, their descendents, and immigrant communities. Ms. Vogt collected materials on immigrant literature in Europe, systematically researching novels by immigrants and immigrant descendents in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and other European countries. Thanks to her outstanding performance as a research apprentice, I was able to read most of the novels during the summer and then to select some of them for use in my course on Multicultural Europe. Currently, as I seek to complete a project on the multicultural debates in both Europe and North America, I am incorporating in the European section an analysis of the literature by immigrants in Europe, and Ms. Vogt's good work proves valuable once again.
This summer, I will continue with the cultural aspect of migration into Europe and hope to collect movies and information on immigrant art. I would be very interested in working again with a URAP apprentice.
---from the Townsend Center for the Humanities Newsletter for April/May 2002
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KENNETH WEISINGER, a faculty member in Comparative Literature and in German, describes how his research apprentice explored archival resources in -Search of material related to the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers.
The URAP program allowed me to employ for the summer of 2001 an undergraduate who had taken two courses from me and whose interests were closely related to my own. The award was especially appreciated in this case because the student had been accepted for graduate study in my department for the following year, and the experience as research assistant gave her the opportunity to exercise her abilities in archival research.
The project on which I am currently working involves collaborative authorship of literary works during the formative period of modern German culture, the early nineteenth century. Prominent among the collaborative pairs I am researching are the Grimm brothers. Since the apprentice had taken a course (not from me) on the German fairy tale, and since I had ample evidence in my classes of her ability to read and interpret literary texts, I was confident that she could do the research I needed.
Essentially, my research apprentice did two things: she read through the Grimms' voluminous correspondence (both between themselves and with other correspondents), looking for explicit statements about their collaborative method of work; and she read through the many literary interpretations of the Grimms' work, again paying particular attention to those instances where collaborative production was singled out for discussion.
The apprentice's work was very valuable to me, both for what she found and for what her research allowed me to eliminate from my own archival research. What I am looking for is in short supply, but when it appears, it is significant. If the apprentice could tell me, for example, that in Wilhelm's correspondence with Savigny, he never mentioned how he and his brother worked together, then that was a great help for me. When she found in the correspondence actual mention of collaborative method, her notes allowed my own research to be more focused. Similarly, in regard to the critical material, there are thousands of books and articles on the Grimm brothers, but very few of them approach the tales as collaborative products; the research assistant was able to shorten the list considerably for me and to direct me to the critics who were most appropriate for my own specific interests.
The Grimms are only one of a half-dozen collaborative pairs I am using in this study of the German national literary canon, but they are unusual because of the enormous amount of material written about them. Tieck and Wackenroder, Brentano and von Arnim, even Goethe and Schiller (as collaborators) have nothing like the mountain of criticism and interpretation written on them that the Grimms have elicited. Having a helper who was familiar with my project and whose skills (linguistic and literary) were a match for the task, was a great help. And I think the experience played a role in directing the apprentice's interest in the discipline as a professional vocation.
---from the Townsend Center for the Humanities Newsletter for April/May 2002
[return to top]See also: College of Letters and Science
Award for Distinguished Research Mentoring of Undergraduates