Meeting Abstract
Undergraduate research is a way for students to build important skillsets and develop interpersonal connections with fellow students and faculty. Practically speaking, undergraduates often seek research experiences as a way to explore various topics and identify the topics that they find most interesting. Thus, the firsthand experience gained by participating in undergraduate research can be used to help students make more informed decisions regarding the their educational and career paths. The biological sciences are comprised of numerous subfields in which students can specialize and therefore a major goal of undergraduate research experiences in biology should be to maximize the number of subfields to which students are exposed. However, finding projects and study systems that accomplish this goal within a single research experience is often difficult. This presentation will focus on the development of an annual summer research experience for freshman and sophomore undergraduates that provides student with experiences integrating various biological subdisciplines into a single project. Using a single study species, we designed student research projects that allowed students to test hypotheses related to ecology, behavior, microbiology, and molecular biology so students could better understand how each of these subfields contributes to our understanding of biology as a whole. Students learned both field and laboratory techniques through interaction with faculty with different areas of expertise in biology. This presentation will describe the process of creating these research experiences and outline both the successes and challenges of the project over the initial two years of implementation.
