Life Lessons: Preparing for Uncertainty

This special issue of Cascade magazine is devoted entirely to the subject of undergraduate research. The increasing visibility of undergraduate research on the University of Oregon campus makes it clear that the time is ripe for showcasing this topic.

For instance, there is now an annual spring symposium that gives dozens of UO undergraduates—most of them majoring in fields in the College of Arts and Sciences—an opportunity to share their work publicly. Another example: With the support of the UO Libraries, the Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal, now in its second year, publishes student research papers and is edited by students themselves.

There are also numerous recognitions (scholarships, fellowships, and so forth) that award funding to UO undergraduates for research projects. Moreover, the President’s Office is making a concerted effort to ensure that UO undergraduates are considered for high-profile national honors that recognize their research scholarship, and this effort has resulted in numerous prestigious awards where you’ll also find a compendium of data points that underscore the vitality of research conducted by UO undergraduate students.

But what do we mean by undergraduate research? To help us define our terms—and explore the reasons why undergraduate research is important— we ask Ian McNeely, (left) associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Q: What do we mean by the word “research”?

A: When people think about research, they automatically think of white lab coats and safety goggles, and laboratory research is obviously a key part of what research is—especially on this campus, with a big commitment to the sciences. But research happens in every field. Everything we do in the university has a research component.

Take my own field, for example—history. A lot of people think of history as looking up facts and that’s about it; there’s not much creativity involved. But we’re always reinterpreting the past. You can think of episodes in your own life that you revisit over time, with a different interpretation based on what you’ve learned in the meantime, and in the field of history, we’re always doing that. We’re discovering new texts and new materials, and also finding new ways to reinterpret old materials.

Even something that seems fixed is always changing. Take Shakespeare or Plato, for instance; scholars have been reinterpreting the same passages of their texts for hundreds if not thousands of years, always putting them in a new context.

Q: How does research differ across the sciences, social sciences and humanities?

A: To oversimplify greatly: in the sciences, you do lab experiments; in the social sciences, you might interview or survey people or run statistical analyses; and in the humanities, you read texts really closely. But that simplification obscures more than it reveals. There are literally hundreds of different ways we do research.

Each field, each faculty member has a particular way of slicing and dicing the world—a method, a discipline for understanding the natural world, the social world, the spiritual world even. What unites them all, whether they’re natural scientists, social scientists or humanists, is that they don’t merely apply these methods like turning a crank, but they continually refine and improve them as a means of discovering things that weren’t known before. 

Q: If faculty members conduct research based on their deep expertise in a subject, what does it mean for an undergraduate to do research?

A: Usually we mean the chance to either work with a faculty member on his or her research project or the chance to do independent work of one’s own, also under the guidance of a faculty member. Of course, tons of our classes involve research in the sense of trying to answer a question, finding evidence, applying problem-solving methods and the like. But when we say “undergraduate research,” we usually mean students who take that to the next level by actually participating in the process of investigation and discovery of new knowledge.

Q: Why is this an important part of undergraduate education?

A: The experience of doing research is critical to success in life. It teaches you how to pose a question and solve a problem. It teaches you the habits of mind and the discipline to take on questions and problems you’ve never even heard of before. It teaches you to cope with uncertainty: knowledge is never a fixed body of information that you can simply master and rely on; that’s a dangerous illusion perpetuated by textbooks that give students a false sense of finality. Instead, knowledge is ever-changing; what we know today may not hold true in the same way tomorrow. And research is the best way, maybe the only way, to experience that sensation in your bones.

That can be daunting, even nerve-racking. But that’s life in the twenty-first century. In the uncertain world we live in, to leave here with exposure to research is to prepare yourself to live in and adapt to an ever-changing world. “Throw a problem at me and I’ll help solve it—analytically, collaboratively, creatively, joyfully.” That’s what we hope will be the experience of our graduates in their working lives and their lives as citizens.

Q: The UO is a liberal arts institution. How does all of the above relate to the context of a liberal arts education?

A: The great thing about the liberal arts is that they encompass things that are worth studying for their own sake—subjects like chemistry or literature or anthropology are just intrinsically valuable, intrinsically fascinating. Of course, not every subject is everyone’s cup of tea, which is why we let you major in whatever you want. And that’s critical because it gives you the motivation, the curiosity, the sense of questioning that leads you to dig deeper and learn more through research.

So you major in what interests you and it trains you to think creatively and analytically, to communicate, to collaborate. The skills you learn that way are actually far more important than whatever subject you study, whatever specific knowledge you gain. It’s great if you’re an English major and go on to study English in graduate school; it’s great if you’re a physics major and go on to design silicon chips. But your career doesn’t need to follow your major: what a liberal arts education does, particularly when it culminates in undergraduate research, is prepare you for life afterward. The fun, the sense of wonder that you get as payoff for studying a particular subject—that you chose yourself—is what makes the enterprise worthwhile.

Q: What’s different about undergraduate research at the UO?

A: Our research faculty members are more involved with undergraduates than at many other places with larger campuses and larger budgets. We’re big enough to be a national and international player in a lot of fields: we do big science; our humanists and social scientists win coveted national awards. But we’re small enough that regular interaction with undergraduates is something we expect of our faculty members, and there are lots of opportunities to pursue advanced research under their guidance.

Q: Why would a research experience matter to a student who isn’t interested in graduate school?

A: For all the reasons I outlined before: research isn’t just for preprofessionals, for people looking to build up a skill set in a prescribed field. That’s great, of course, if that’s what you want, but research prepares you to perceive problems, pose questions, develop discipline and rigor and method, and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from shedding light on some area that had been dark before.

We actually call research fields “disciplines” because they’re all about training yourself to do hard work. It’s like pumping iron. It’s like getting up at six in the morning and rowing a boat over and over again. Why do you need that discipline? Because that’s what you need to succeed in life. Life is tough. You get out of here, it’s tougher than ever before. The economy is being upended by globalization and technology. You need to know not only how to be a good worker, but to have the imagination, the creativity, the adaptability, the flexibility to react to an ever-changing world. That’s what any of the disciplines give you. And you can only experience that by being exposed to research yourself. You can’t get it by reading a textbook. Besides, it’s fun to explore. 

-Interview by Lisa Raleigh
-Photo by Jack Liu

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