More than a Summer Job
Undergraduates gain valuable experience as IPR research assistants

Fall, 2008, Volume 30, Number 2

Jeannette Colyvas discusses data collection with her undergraduate research assistant, Stan Polit.

For college students, the gold standard of summer jobs is landing one that (a) pays and (b) is relevant to one’s academic and career aspirations. IPR’s Summer Undergraduate Research Assistants program offers students both—and more.

“This is not just a summer job,” said program director Emma Adam, a developmental psychobiologist and IPR faculty fellow. “We’re interested in getting people into policy-related research early in their careers.”

The program this year hosted 23 undergraduates, who worked side-by-side with 18 IPR faculty members on real-world research projects. The program can be as valuable to faculty as it is to students, especially junior faculty who might not come to Northwestern with other means to fund research assistance for new projects, Adam said.

This summer Jeannette Colyvas, assistant professor of human development, social policy, and learning sciences and an IPR faculty associate, was able to jumpstart a new project with her research assistant, Stan Polit, a junior in learning and organizational change.

“What I was really pleased about is that it was an opportunity for an undergraduate to get involved in the beginning of a research project and the primary data collection,” Colyvas said.  As a first step in researching the new paradigm of intellectual property disputes between universities and businesses, Polit collected hundreds of legal proceedings related to the topic, preparing the data for advanced text analysis tools.

“It was a nice intersection between what I learn about in my [learning and organizational change] classes and the legal field,” said Polit, who plans to attend law school after graduation.

Many research assistants experience the program as a test run for their future careers in the social sciences and the graduate work needed to follow that path. Faye Zheng, a senior in mathematical methods in the social sciences, decided to pursue a PhD in statistics after working with IPR Faculty Fellow Larry Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy. In addition to the practical skills she gained, Zheng said she appreciated the contact with other researchers. “I have a better picture of what researchers do, from the project and just talking to the professor and graduate students in my office,” she said.

The program assumes that undergraduates have little or no previous research experience, so the research assistants attend a three-day workshop to learn about statistical methods and software, such as SPSS and Stata, and resources like the University’s social science data banks. Polit said he appreciated the training and the chance to use the new software in his summer research because manipulating the data and drawing conclusions validates all the work that goes into coding.

“The data don’t really come alive until you see it in SPSS and Stata,” Polit said. “It really makes it worthwhile to see what you can learn from analyses using those sets.”

For more information, see www.northwestern.edu/ipr/ugradresearch.html.