UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Having to turn students away from the lab just didn’t sit well with professor Emily Bell.
“We know that being involved in research is a really valuable and important experience for students,” she said. “It changes the way they think about science, the way they interact with their other coursework. And it's super important for their career readiness and their ability to be competitive and get the jobs that they want.”
Bell, associate research professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, worked to place as many undergraduates as she could through independent study. But there just weren’t enough positions.
“I was turning away at least 20 students a semester,” she said. “There’s just more demand than there is supply.”
So Bell said she had the idea of creating a new, first-of-its-kind two-course research program to serve those undergraduates.
Result of resolve
“Nobody’s done anything like this before, at least not wet bench-wise, that I’ve found,” she explained. “But with the resources that a course has, I could incorporate a lot more students, get a group of 20 together and do this as a team. And that’s a realistic experience for doing research. It isn’t this solitary thing you do; it’s interactive. So doing it as a team actually seemed more authentic to me.”
Each cohort would start in the fall with a completely new project — formulating a hypothesis, reading scientific literature, designing and conducting experiments, analyzing the data, and then in the spring writing up their results in a publication and presenting them.
“A start-to-finish experience,” Bell said. “They do everything a professional researcher does.”
And the program would be targeted toward change-of-campus students entering their first year at University Park and give them first priority in the application process.
“The reason for that,” Bell explained, “is that many incoming students haven’t yet had the opportunity to make connections with faculty at University Park, which can make it difficult to find a research lab placement. Also, getting a team of students together who are all new to campus and all have an interest in research, you automatically give them a community, so I was hoping that would make their transition here smoother, as well.”
Bell also made the application process as simple as possible, with just a single prerequisite.
“I want to reach students who haven’t had experience, who maybe are unsure if this is for them because they haven’t had the chance to explore it,” she said. “I don't want to put up barriers. I want people from every kind of experience level and background to feel like this is something they could be involved in and benefit from.”
Without the benefit of research experience, Bell added, students may not have the chance to pursue a career path they otherwise could have, “so it’s really important to me to give opportunities to those students, to promote the diversity of people that get to progress in science. I want to help open doors for students that otherwise wouldn't have considered even applying because they would feel like they weren't competitive.”
After more than a year of preparation, Bell was finally set to launch her new program — in fact, her first time teaching a lab course — in fall 2020.
And then the pandemic hit.
Resilience rewarded
“This program is something I’ve been really passionate about,” she said. “I felt like it would be so valuable for the students, and I didn't want to cancel it. I didn’t want them to lose that opportunity.”
So Bell made the necessary accommodations for social distancing in the lab, as well as for hybrid and remote instruction: New safety protocols were established; students rotated through the lab in smaller groups and in shifts, and some participated entirely online.