Mentoring Student Research
Are you a faculty member interested in assistance from an undergraduate student on your research project?
First Experiences in Research provides Arts and Sciences faculty with assistance from first-year students in the spring term. Students are recruited through The Office of Experiential Learning (OEL) and receive academic credit or work study assistance for five or 10 hours per week of work on the faculty member’s research or creative endeavor.
OEL will strategically match you with students who are interested in your research and motivated to assist in achieving the goals of your project. Participating faculty mentors can request a single student assistant or a team of students for their projects.
Faculty mentors are the most important part of the First Experiences in Research program! To participate in First Experiences in Research, please contact Margaret Heely, Director of the OEL at meh33@pitt.edu.
You will be asked to provide a description of your research project, a list of activities in which the student or students would engage, and any specific skills needed for the project.
Once we receive projects from faculty, the following preparatory activities are completed in the fall term.
- OEL posts research projects for students to review
- OEL identifies interested students
- OEL provides each participating faculty member with resumes of students who are interested in applying to work on his or her research project
- Each faculty member conducts in-person or telephone interviews with students
- Faculty members notify OEL of their choices of students to work on their projects
- OEL contacts the student to confirm the assignment of the student to the faculty mentor’s research project
OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT FIRST EXPERIENCES IN RESEARCH
Students attend bi-weekly cohort meetings where topics focus on keeping research notebooks or logs, information seeking skills in the Pitt Library system, reading peer reviewed journals, how to write abstracts, how to present research via oral presentation, and poster format.
As a final project, all students in the First Experiences in Research program present posters about their research at the First Experiences Poster Presentation usually scheduled during the last week of the spring term.
