College offers new $5,500 grants
Students wishing to spend leave terms engaged in on-campus research will soon find their financial burdens lightened considerably due to a recently-approved College program offering substantial grants to support undergraduate researchers. In the past, limited funds have been available to support the travel and campus expenses of such students, but the new grants -- at $5,500 apiece -- will constitute a proper salary for research work. "The idea is that if a student wants academic experience but needs to get a leave-term job to save up money, we would provide them with a job that pays the equivalent of a summer job to conduct research," Dean of Faculty Jamshed Bharucha said. New faculty mentoring awards -- intended to recognize faculty who devote significant time and energy to advising students on a variety of issues outside of the classroom -- were announced alongside the research grants. Honoring faculty members who have worked with students on topics as varied as honors theses and independent research, the awards will acknowledge areas of excellence "that typically do not get explicitly recognized," according to Bharucha. A monetary grant will also accompany the awards, and faculty recipients will be expected to hold a seminar on the complementary roles of teaching and research. Bharucha, whose office was responsible for the creation of the new programs, said that the student grants were necessitated by a desire to improve the overall undergraduate academic experience, particularly in the area of undergraduate research. "We believe that opportunities for students to work one-on-one with professors in the actual act of discovery and creation is a very powerful learning experience," Bharucha said, noting that the grants were partly in response to Student Assembly's passage of the Undergraduate Teaching Initiative last term. "We were delighted when the Student Assembly launched the UTI," Bharucha said.