Preview of the Profession
Undergraduates get early exposure to a research career

James Rosenbaum (front center) and IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook (back left) meet with students in IPR's Summer Undergraduate Research Assistants Program.

What does it mean to be a researcher? While classes and coursework might peak interest in graduate school or a future career in policy, students are often removed from day-to-day research activities, such as designing and implementing a study. And so the Summer Undergraduate Research Assistants Program at the Institute for Policy Research, now in its 13th year, brings students in to work directly with cutting-edge researchers on their projects.

“This is definitely the most intense [undergraduate] research experience that Northwestern provides,” said Jordan Fein, a senior majoring in American studies and political science. “You get a real taste of what is going on in your field.”

Students in the program work full-time on various research projects run by IPR faculty. Just this summer, 17 professors hosted a total of 21 students.

“Students learn that research is a dynamic process that differs from what is taught in textbooks,” said program director James Rosenbaum, professor of education and social policy. “For example, they might start working with one model and then find that they either have to refine it or even consider alternate models.”

Fein worked jointly with two IPR fellows—political scientist James Druckman on theories of campaign websites and energy politics and sociologist Leslie McCall on how beliefs about opportunity, inequality, and redistribution are reported in the news. Working one-on-one with each professor gave him skills and ideas that will be useful to his senior thesis, which will examine national discourse on healthcare reform, he said.

“Part of my thesis is going to be a media analysis of the healthcare debate,” Fein explained, “and I’m going to be doing some Druckman-style laboratory experiments with framing as well.”

Curie Lee, a junior in social policy and political science, said working with the raw data was one of her favorite parts of the program. She helped education researcher and IPR associate James Spillane code and organize interviews for his Principal Policy and Practice (P3) Study, part of his broad body of work on distributed leadership in schools.

“Nobody has done this kind of research [on school leadership] before Jim, and that was really inspiring,” said Lee. She hopes eventually to apply some of these big-picture lessons from the summer to a career in teaching and education policy.