By Jordan Novet
The Student Government Association (SGA) will sign legislation Thursday to create an office to keep track of, promote and fund undergraduate research throughout all six of the university’s colleges.
The SGA Academic Affairs Committee wrote the legislation last month. It was passed unanimously Oct. 6, and awaits official signatures by the senators who wrote it, as well as SGA President Ashley Adams and university President Richard Freeland.
While many undergraduate students throughout the six schools are currently doing research, none of the schools are able to keep exact numbers of how many students are involved in the program and what their projects are about, said Michael DeRamo, SGA vice president for academic affairs.
“Undergraduate research helps you go one-on-one with your major,” DeRamo said. “It’s sort of like co-op in that you do what you’ll be doing when you graduate, but you don’t have to take time off. This office would be one place for all students of the university, in all of the six colleges, to learn about undergraduate research.”
DeRamo said Sen. Mariko Howe, another member of the Academic Affairs Committee, wrote the proposal to create a formal research program and brought it to the committee.
Howe, a junior behavioral neuroscience major, is currently on co-op in Arts and Sciences Dean James Stellar’s lab, conducting research on cocaine addiction in an animal model. She said while the College of Arts and Sciences has an undergraduate research program, it is not firmly established nor as big as it could be.
The program, called the Center for Experiential Education’s Faculty Undergraduate Research Initiative (FURI), isn’t widely known, she said.
Som students said they do not know of FURI, but said they were interested in the program.
“I personally have never heard of [FURI],” junior psychology major Sabrina Scharf said. “It should be made more public.”
Scharf said she would be more encouraged to conduct research if an office were created for that purpose.
“The student body needs encouragement from the Northeastern
administration, especially undergraduates,” Scharf said.
Stellar said one of the university’s main goals is to further establish its undergraduate research program.
“I personally feel that a centralized program would be a wonderful addition to campus,” he said in an e-mail statement. “It goes to the core mission of Northeastern’s experiential framework and is one of the College’s top goals. Robust undergraduate-faculty research collaboration will drive the kind of culture we want for our students and break down the two-way barriers that naturally develop between students and faculty.”
Former SGA President Bill Durkin, a junior political science major, said he has worked on expanding undergraduate research since his sophomore year.
“[The legislation] has been a priority of mine as a senator,” Durkin said.
Like DeRamo and Stellar, Durkin said Northeastern’s undergraduate research needs to be more streamlined than the current FURI program.
“[FURI] is a good model, and it has come a long way. These [research] projects are all over the university, but they’re in scattered clusters. The next step we need to take with this legislation is building some centralized office to coordinate the efforts to track the research,” he said.
Undergraduate students who do research “tend to get into better graduate schools,” Howe said. They tend to pursue the highest degrees in their fields and end up with better jobs after school, she said.
Durkin said research opportunities can help the university gain the nationwide recognition administrators want.
“This is what students are looking for,” Durkin said. “We’ve found that more and more students are looking at graduate school, and with research they’d be setting themselves apart from other applicants. We talk about being a top 100 school. We need to act like it.”
