Taking the Honors

When the 16 undergraduate students who are gathered in Duncan Hall, room 1049, begin a class session by reintroducing themselves to each other, with names and home departments, an uninformed observer might be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled into either a social or a therapeutic event. It’s when the students go beyond name and department and briefly describe the projects they’re working on—“the influence of dialect on phoneme perception,” “the rise of fallen women in mid-Victorian literature,” “eco-industrialism and the Houston Ship Channel”—that the visitor clearly understands that the gathering in question is in fact Honors 470, also known as the Rice Undergraduate Scholars Program.

RUSP, as the program is commonly and affectionately known, is a yearlong class in which juniors and seniors from all across the university get to work on sophisticated research projects, the kinds of projects that a generation ago were restricted to professors and graduate students. Besides the investigations mentioned above, Rice undergrads have done research into gender differences in spatial reasoning abilities (a gender difference that doesn’t hold true for Rice students, according to the student’s experiment), on the relationship between urban sprawl and air quality in Houston, and on the snap judgments employers make when they learn that a job-seeker is disabled.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the research is not that it’s performed by undergraduates, but that all these undergraduates present their research not only to their faculty mentors but to each other. The young “knot theory” mathematician has to present his research into DNA folding in a way that the budding Victorian lit scholar has at least an outside chance of grasping.

In other words, RUSP is the perhaps the ultimate Rice undergraduate experience; it cuts across disciplines in a way that appeals to the university’s many double- and triple-majors, and it challenges students who love to work hard. “RUSP students are Rice students squared,” says Jim Kinsey, the D.R. Bullard–Welch Foundation Professor of Science in the chemistry department.

Kinsey, who is one of three faculty coordinators for the program, has been active in RUSP since 1988, when he came to Rice as dean of natural sciences. “RUSP was in its infancy,” according to Kinsey. RUSP had begun a few years before as a result of a doomsday book and a Ford Foundation grant. The book, written by Princeton University president Bill Bowen, declared that not enough young scholars were going into academic careers and prophesied that, by the end of the 1990s, there would not be enough new-generation Ph.D.s to fill university positions across the country.

Bowen’s prediction was wrong, of course, but it had a positive effect anyway. The Ford Foundation wanted to encourage young scholars to seriously consider academic careers, and it funded a Rice program to do just that.

Indeed, preparing undergraduates for lives dedicated to research, scholarship, and teaching was the original, and now somewhat lessened, emphasis at RUSP. In addition to introducing the students to the world of research, it also prepared them, via weekly seminars on various topics, for possible academic life.

Seminar topics included items such as how to apply to graduate school, how to really use the library, women in academia, and intellectual property law.

In fact, RUSP students still attend similar seminars, but the accent is now less on recruiting the next generation of university professors. “It’s not to persuade anyone,” says another faculty coordinator, Jim Pomerantz, professor of psychology and director of Rice’s Neurosciences Program. “It’s to help them figure out early on” if they’re interested in academic careers or not. “Most RUSP students are at least going to graduate or professional school,” he says.

In addition to teaching the orientation classes, the faculty coordinators—Kinsey, Pomerantz, and Don Johnson, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Statistics—also fill in the students on “life in the academy,” as Pomerantz puts it, based on their own richly varied experiences. Kinsey taught at MIT for years and, from 1977 to 1982, was head of the chemistry department there. He also has served for many years as dean of natural sciences at Rice. Pomerantz served as provost at Brown University. “I’m just a Rice faculty member,” Johnson says unassumingly. “Just chairman of the department.”

Most of the students have little idea of what a professor does outside of classroom and office hours. “It’s an eye-opener to them to learn how demanding teaching is,” Pomerantz says.

These days, guest speakers who prepare the undergraduates for concerns not directly related to their academic focus seem to make the greatest impression on the faculty coordinators and students alike. For example, one speaker addresses venture capital issues for students whose projects have economic potential. Faculty from Rice’s Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communications present well-received sessions each year on developing professional identity through effective communication. The Cain Project’s Linda Driskill and Tracy Volz enjoy working with RUSP students. “They will need excellent communication skills to become leaders in their fields,” Volz says. “If they pursue academic careers, these students will eventually have to write grants to fund their research, and then they’ll have to promote their work through journal publications and conference presentations.”

One of the ways in which the Cain Project supports students’ progress toward this goal is by helping students plan and practice presentations. Teaching students to give effective presentations is perhaps the Cain Project’s most important function at RUSP. That’s because every student has to give detailed presentations on his or her project twice during the course of the semester. And in some cases, they will be addressing students who have only the vaguest idea of what they’re talking about, so they have to communicate very clearly indeed.

The students’ first presentation comes late in the fall semester. The previous spring, when they applied for acceptance to RUSP, the students had to turn in both the name of the faculty adviser who was going to mentor them in a weekly series of meetings and a preliminary sketch of their research proposal.

The students will likely have decided on their proposal after talking to their potential mentors. “They usually pick an adviser they like and whose work they’re interested in,” says Kinsey, “and then say, ‘I’d like to do undergraduate research with you.’ The faculty member will usually suggest a not-very-detailed range of subjects.”

Different fields have very different ways of conducting research, and each student is encouraged to do research in the manner of his or her major or in the style of the department that the student’s project falls under—the students can choose to do research in a field outside their major. “A faculty member in chemistry or biochemistry will have a research group that has a program of research,” Kinsey says. “That program has niches, and the student will be offered a niche.” Humanities research styles are quite different, of course. “Most humanities faculty members have graduate students,” Kinsey says, “but those students are much more independent of the program the faculty member might have.”

In either case, the students attend the weekly RUSP classes, begin their readings, their experiments, and their meetings with their advisers, and also report to the faculty coordinator who has been assigned to them. Pomerantz takes the social science students; Kinsey the chemistry, biochemistry, and geological sciences students; and Johnson the engineering and the humanities students. “Don’s got the hardest job,” Kinsey confides, as those are the two broad groupings that are hardest to reconcile.

The students are generally very good about doing their work and meeting regularly with their mentors, but Kinsey says, “I have the role of being a nudge.” If he hasn’t gotten a progress report from a student in two weeks, “I’ll send an e-mail.”

A few weeks before the fall semester ends, the students make their first presentations, detailing their preliminary research, and what it is they’re hoping to accomplish in the second semester, when they will put their research into practice, either by conducting experiments or writing a scholarly paper. Here’s where the challenge of communicating across departmental boundaries begins.

Brad Lega

Brad Lega is a senior in the philosophy department. Last year, under the mentorship of professor of philosophy Hugo Englehardt, he began his inquiry into “Property Rights and the Post-Modern Dilemma.” In his readings and meetings with Englehardt, he discovered that “you can’t use reason to justify moral beliefs” and that moral beliefs are instead tied to the “ethical communities” that one is associated with—religions, for example. So, “how do you justify ownership?” Lega asks. “Ownership is a moral question. How do we structure a society in which people own things?” He adds, “In which cases should property rights be limited? You can’t rationally justify limitations.”

In preparing for his presentation, Lega found his Cain coaching to be very helpful. “They point out the little things,” he says. “‘If you’re going to stand at the podium for this amount of time, make yourself comfortable.’” He laughs a little when he remembers that “some people got very conscious of certain things, like making eye contact.”

Some of the presentations were too technical for him, but everybody, scientist or humanist, has an opinion on rationality, morality, and property rights. “They tried to argue with me,” Lega recalls, sounding bemused. “They tried to say that moral beliefs were rational.”

But far from being intimidated, Lega enjoyed both the intellectual give-and-take and the challenge of communicating his ideas with nonphilosophers who brought a fresh perspective to the debate.

“A philosophy student would place me in the field of philosophy,” Lega says. “It was interesting to see how people outside the field approached it.”

He had never spoken at such length about philosophy before, and the challenge taught him a great deal. “You couldn’t gloss over anything. You had to admit where you were unsure.”

After the students come back for the spring semester, they attend more classes on life in the academy and get their first real taste of postgraduate life. That is, they do real research.

“For any student to participate in an honest-to-goodness research project is a transforming experience,” Kinsey says. “No lab course can give the experience of actually doing research. If you’re in a class, you’re doing the same experiment as everybody else. Somebody will work the experiment out. But finding the answer in your own research is completely on you—and you may fail.”

Before the spring semester is over, all the students will have made second presentations, this time giving the results of their research. Not every experiment will have turned out well. But failed experiments are part of academic life too.

“They usually wind up with a lot of tears,” Pomerantz says. “People don’t know how hard it is to do a project. So they learn patience, tolerance, and how hard you have to work to make something good happen.”

There is a final important component to the RUSP experience. Through monies made available by the provost’s office, students receive small grants that are usually spent on travel. Most student trips are made to attend professional conferences. But last year, Leslie Contreras, then a junior in the English department, used her $1,600 grant to go England for a week over winter break.

Leslie Contreras

Mentored by Professor Helena Michie, Contreras was doing research into Victorian gender roles as expressed in novels by the Brontë sisters and by George Sand. Michie had once commented in class that, in certain Victorian novels, the young and often unruly female protagonist will disappear from the story for a time before returning either as the embodiment of young Victorian womanhood or as a nonconforming woman who is doomed to failure.

Contreras became very interested in this off-stage transformation process and what it said about Victorian views of a woman’s role. She approached Michie about doing research into the subject and decided that RUSP offered the ideal structure for such a complicated and time-consuming investigation.

She went to England with a letter of introduction from Michie—another trick of academic life well learned—and with it was able to gain entrance to rare book collections at Oxford that even Oxford undergraduates seldom enter. There she found period conduct manuals for girls that clearly spelled out what Contreras calls the “Victorian view of maturation.”

She also learned her own hard lessons about research. There’s never enough time, and it might take you a whole day to find a single relevant page.

The RUSP grant also greatly broadened her horizons. “I’d never been out of Texas before,” says Contreras, a native Houstonian. “My parents were very worried.”

After Contreras returned and finished her paper, she realized that she’d gotten the research bug. “The experience made me want to continue,” she says, then she lists the graduate schools she’s applying to. She hopes for a career in academia.

In the meantime, RUSP coordinators Pomerantz, Kinsey, and Johnson look on their students with delight—and a little envy. “When I was an undergrad,” Pomerantz says, “we got a 10-minute presentation on academic life. I was completely in the dark.” Kinsey adds enthusiastically, “I wish I’d had all this stuff.”