By Larry Bernard
Undergraduate students who do research enhance their college experience, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings told undergraduate researchers last week.
"If students -- and that's a big question -- if students take advantage of the resources at Cornell, then they can have much richer and deeper experiences than I had at Haverford," the president said in an address titled "What I Didn't Learn in College."
Rawlings, who earned a bachelor's degree from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1966, spoke at a plenary session of Cornell's Undergraduate Research Forum in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall, on April 24. He was joined by Jessika Trancik, a junior in materials science and engineering, who also addressed the plenary session after remarks by John Hopcroft, dean of the College of Engineering.
The forum, co-chaired by Shefali Gandhi, a junior biochemistry major, and Nikki Holtmeier, a junior chemistry major, featured more than 150 undergraduate researchers who presented their projects in oral or poster form at locations throughout campus, sponsored by the Undergraduate Research Board. Marilyn Williams, assistant dean for academic services in the College of Arts and Sciences, helped organize the forum.
Rawlings said that when he read the abstracts of student research, he was struck by how different his undergraduate education had been 30 years ago at a small liberal arts college with no graduate programs and only 450 students.
"There simply were not the opportunities that Cornell has to offer. Haverford offered 30 majors. Cornell offers that many in the College of Arts and Sciences alone. There are many more faculty members here ... major research resources and major research libraries of over 5 million volumes . . . and a faculty in general that comprises leading scholars in every discipline."
At Haverford, he continued, the student research experience comprised doing laboratory experiments in which the faculty already knew the outcome. At many colleges, Rawlings said, "student researchers find themselves verifying references or washing out test tubes. Being part of an integral team simply was not possible."
He added that "access to frontier research" is another benefit that Cornell affords its undergraduates. "In the end, some of you will have discovered something new. Research for you is not just a laboratory exercise."
Rawlings said that in addition to the teamwork, first-rate libraries and resources and excellent faculty, there was another advantage to doing research as a Cornell undergraduate:
"You are going to remember what you did in research more than what you learned in your other classes. It's yours. It's your personal contribution. You are going to retain it. You will have acquired knowledge and experienced the excitement of creating something new . . . Many of you will feel 'Eureka, I found it!' and it wasn't even what you were looking for."
Finally, the president reminded the students that such opportunities are rare at universities. "This is the exception, not the rule. Take advantage of it."
Trancik has been doing research in materials science and engineering under the guidance of Professor Stephen Sass since the end of her freshman year at Cornell. In her talk, titled "Materials Science: Surpassing Traditional Boundaries," she showed images of unconventional applications of materials from a recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
"One common goal of all research in materials science is to physically surpass traditional boundaries by either inventing a new material or modifying the properties of an existing one," Trancik told the audience.
Trancik is co-author on several scientific papers and is co-inventor on two patent applications. She described one project, in which she worked toward developing a new technique for tempering ceramics, making them more resistant to fracture. With the ability to withstand high temperatures, such a material may be useful in a new generation of jet engines. That work, which Trancik did as a sophomore with graduate student Ersan Ustundag, led to her most recent research on new ways to process thin metal-ceramic films for magnetic storage devices. She also showed some of those results, taken from an electron microscope and X-ray diffraction equipment in Cornell's Materials Science Center.
"I feel that I've grown quite a bit from my experiences," she told the audience. "Part of what makes Cornell so internationally recognized is the discovery that happens here. It's easy, as an undergraduate, to miss this. Having a role in research has given me an appreciation of the pure intellectual power of this place."
Trancik has presented her findings at a professional scientific conference -- the American Ceramics Society meeting in Seattle in November. And she was part of a nine-member Cornell contingent to present research at the 10th annual National Conference for Undergraduate Research in Asheville, N.C., April 18-20.
For another student project that received funding from the CURB, see the story about Trac Vu, who reunited three generations of his family -- on film.
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