Sowing the Seeds of Scholarship

How an Undergraduate Research Program is Cultivating New Scholars

Where will the next generation of researchers come from? Instead of waiting for undergraduates to accidentally stumble into that career track, the College of Communication is sowing the seeds of scholarship through their Undergraduate Mentor Fellowship program.

Funded by the College’s student enrichment fund — voted on by the students themselves ­— the Fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis each year to fund a variety of modest research projects. It’s a simple premise – put a small team of three to four undergraduate students under the supervision of a graduate student and unleash them on an interesting question.

The first year was something of a gamble as faculty always have projects they’d like to fund, and grad students are always looking for a little extra cash as well as a chance to publish. But would the undergrads play ball? The final results were gratifying, as applicants far exceeded the available “trainee-researcher” slots, with published scholarship coming out of many of the projects.

Journalism professor Mark Tremayne’s experience with the project was overwhelmingly positive.

“There was definitely greater enthusiasm than I expected,” Tremayne says. “I had more than 40 volunteers and most of them didn’t know about the money. As for turning them onto research, it will take time to see, but I would not be surprised if the experience opened their eyes to graduate work at some point in the future.”

Tremayne’s project examined citizen-produced web content to learn how the explosion in blogging, podcasting and YouTube production might influence the mass communication process and impact mainstream media producers.

Graduate student Elizabeth Gardner supervised three undergrads in the project: Noelene Clark, Hyunjin Kim and Wendy Topletz on two coding projects. The immediate result was three papers, one of which, "When Worlds Collide: Citizen Produced Media and Repurposed Traditional Media Content on YouTube" (Elizabeth Gardner, Noelene Clark, Hyunjin Kim and Wendy Topletz) was presented at a conference at Texas Tech University. Another, "Testing the Visual Culture Hypothesis in Emerging Media" (Mark Tremayne, Liz Gardner, Jakewon Jeong, Jae Kook Lee and Nan Zheng) was submitted to the International Communication Association for its annual conference.

Other professors report similar success. Professor Madeline Maxwell and doctoral student Scott Anderson supervised undergrads Ryan Capece, Eshna Nambiar and Kruti Parekh in a study to assess the use of metaphors of hostile communication from 30 plus hours of conflict mediation sessions. Their unexpected results had both theoretical and practical implications for conflict mediation and the training of mediators.

Maxwell was frankly surprised the work led to a published paper. “It’s a little hard to plug in inexperienced people so that it’s both valuable to them — where they understand the process — and valuable for me as well, that I can trust the work,” she says. “This project worked out in every way.”

That academic paper, "Metaphors of Hostile Communication" (Madeline Maxwell, Scott Anderson, Kruti Parekh, Eshna Nambiar and Ryan Capece), was accepted at the National Communication Association conference in 2007. Undergrad Kruti Parekh had the thrill of presenting the paper at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research that same year.

“Undergraduate exposure to graduate-like experience is invaluable in preparing undergraduates for both academic and non-academic careers,” Maxwell says. “Kruti found that it changed the way she thought of herself. She had never thought about doing anything serious academically and now she’s off in grad school in India.”

New faculty member Talia Stroud jumped at the chance to use the program to expand on an earlier study that had shown people’s impressions of the Iraq war and terrorism depended on which media outlets they use. She wanted to analyze the content of several newspapers and TV programs to understand the differences she found.

The UMP fellowship gave her that opportunity. Her team of students – Sarah Rayburn, Lauren Callahan, Nausheen Jivani and Jace Wietziboski, under the direction of graduate student Kristin Stimson — helped develop a system for coding the media content of newspaper articles and TV news transcripts from the 2004 presidential campaign and then assisted with the analysis.

“This study takes us a step closer to understanding how media use influences people’s views of important issues,” Stroud says. “It was wonderful to work with such a team of talented and engaged undergraduates and for them to learn about the scholarly process.”

Preliminary results from the study were incorporated into a paper that Stroud presented at the American Political Science Association and will also be submitted to another conference in hopes of giving the students an opportunity to attend an academic conference.

Its permanent status assured, Dean Roderick Hart believes the fellowships will have a lasting effect on everyone involved.

“Too often scholarship trickles down from professor to student — this program proves that research can trickle up as well,” he concludes.