On a campus known for its research and discoveries, sometimes those findings come from a slightly younger crowd than one would expect'undergraduates.
The path leading towards such prestigious research is not always glamorous. Ryan Coller, a UW-Madison senior began working in the bacteriology department the summer after his freshman year. A friend of his was vacating a position working with a graduate student in the department and offered Coller the job.
\I went in for three weeks, no credit, no pay,"" to see if the job would work out, Coller said.
He stayed on beyond those three weeks and now is helping Tim Donohue, professor of bacteriology, understand protein assembly.
He is trying to understand one step in a long pathway that will result in a protein capable of transporting an electron, a microscopic negatively charged particle. At first, he needed to work under a graduate student to accomplish his goals, but now that the graduate student has moved on, the job Coller once was just helping out with is now his own project. The difference between the quality of work done by graduate students and undergraduates is not always noticeable, according to Donohue.
While Coller is working on mutating DNA and proteins in Fred Hall, across campus Yuliana, a UW-Madison senior is trying to find out why salmon die after spawning. With the guidance of Terrance Barry, an aquaculture scientist, she is using knowledge she gained raising Japanese colorful carp in a pond behind her home in Indonesia. With a passion for fish driving her, she has been studying a hormone named cortisol that is present in remarkably high concentrations in the dying salmon.
According to Barry, her work is as good as any graduate student he has come across: ""As an undergraduate, to be honest with you, she acts more like a [graduate student] in terms of her reliability and so on.""
Yuliana got involved another way. Her second-semester introductory biology class offered her a chance to work in a lab for credit instead of writing a research paper that would have kept her locked up in libraries for a semester. She decided she wanted to work for Barry instead.
The avenue Yuliana took to get into research is a common one. Every semester, dozens of students get their first chance at research by taking Zoology 152. Projects range from working with aquatic plants to researching cancer or asthma. Whatever the students chose to do, they are making contributions to science that researchers worldwide may use as if it was done by the most respected scientist in the land.
While it is unlikely that on their own these researchers will find cures for cancer or revolutionize the way science is done during their undergraduate tenures, they are doing real research and they are getting numerous benefits.
Research is an important preparation for a plethora of students going into graduate school or medical school. Coller is in the process of applying to medical school and said his research experience was instrumental in giving him the experience it will take to make it through medical school.
Medical school grades are not the only grades from which undergraduate researchers benefit.
""Once I started taking biology [courses], a lot of the things we talked about in [class] I had already learned one-on-one with a guy who knew so much about it,"" Coller said.
For many students, science has been secluded to the classroom and textbooks, but by getting into research, they begin to see how the tools they have learned in class apply to the real world.
Paul Bertics, a professor of biomolecular chemistry, is helping Ekokobe Fronkem, a UW-Madison senior, try to unlock the secrets behind the causes of asthma. In doing this, he hopes to show Fronkem another side of science.
""There are two waves of learning that are needed,"" Bertics said. ""You can take learning language, you need to get a basic understanding of the tools, in language it would be the words ?? In biochemistry it would be the techniques. That kind of thing is more of a rote understanding of basic concepts, and that's what courses are very good at.""
He added, ""but you can read a book on how to drive a car all you want; it doesn't make you an expert driver. Eventually you have to get into a car and actually do it.""
The list of benefits goes on, but Coller, Fronkem and Yuliana all agree that it is an honor to get to work with such talented mentors, whether or not it is going to help their grades.
One thing the mentors do not do is baby the students along. Students are responsible for getting their own data and running experiments without direct faculty supervision.
""I get to stand back and enjoy watching him learn,"" Donohue said, ""[and] pose his own questions and generate the self confidence to take his research into new areas and propose his own [theories] to explain the observations he has made.""
Yuliana dissects a few of her fish every week and checks for the presence of the suspect hormone. All the while Barry can sit back, knowing that Yuliana can do it all on her own.
Bertics says he tries to help guide Fronkem, but that does not tell him what to do at every step. Making mistakes in the lab is part of learning.
As the students make their ways through complicated experiments and arduous hours stuck in a lab, they are getting experience few people will ever get. All the while they are getting this research experience at one of the best research universities in the country.
