Friday, November 21, 2008
Article
URP
Abhijit Sarang, after his pre-university, had many options to choose for his graduation in engineering. Finally, he landed up in mechanical engineering. When asked for the reason, his coolest response was “would like to do something related to machine design”. Means, he had within himself an interest developed to learn and understand more about machine design.
This is not just with Abhijith, there are a certain percentage of students who have taken up their graduation studies not just with the objective of settling on a high paying, glamorous corporate jobs but certainly to satisfy their hunger to learn and understand the subject of their interest.
If we precisely look at the opportunities such students have been offered in order to start and continue their exploration, they have to wait for many semesters to start reading the particular subject of interest and in most of the scenarios they have been thought or guided only from the aspect of scoring some percentage of marks in the examinations. In addition to this, non availability of facilities like good library and a guide or a mentor would gradually fade away the interest and student’s focus would get diverted.
“Undergraduate Research Program” has addressed this issue in a most efficient and effective way. The research is a process of investigation and examination of a subject from a different point of view. It is also a systematic process of collecting and analyzing information to increase the understanding and to communicate that understanding to others.
In this program, the student would start his research work in the filed of his interest during his graduation itself. Master Graduation is no more a basic requirement to start the research.
University of Washington (UW) in US has been running this program very successfully and is popularly known as “URP”. They have devised a well structured approach and the effectiveness could certainly be scaled though the most exciting research projects they have successfully completed.
Pavan Vaswani, an undergraduate researcher in University of Washington (UW), working on one of his most favorite research project "Non-Invasive Determination of Intracranial Pressure by Means of Vibroacoustography”, says “I enjoy research – it usually seems to be the largest contributor to
my education at the UW – and want to do research as a career, so I started as soon as I could. For me, one of the most exciting parts of research is that 'It works!' moment. I would argue it beats out the 'Eureka!' moment.
Jessica E. Salvador, Graduate Staff Assistant – URP, UW, clarifies on minimum age to take up research and says “Usually there is no minimum age as long as the person is a UW student. The level of education required varies by project and often faculty describes what they need”.
The Council of Undergraduate Research in Washington is functioning with the objective of institutionalizing Undergraduate Research. They have designed undergraduate research workshops using a regional approach. The workshops will assist participating institutions in articulating their goals for institutionalizing undergraduate research, as well as developing strategies to achieve these goals on their respective campuses.
Down here, that too in a remote part of Karnataka, The Chintana (North Karnataka) and CSCS (Centre for the Study of culture and Society Bangalore jointly conducted a cultural study workshop at Sirsi (Karnataka) with the objective of teaching research at undergraduate level. About 25 undergraduate students from three different colleges participated in the workshop along with few teaching faculty. Mr. Vivek Dhareshwar (CSCS) expressed his complete satisfaction about the participation of young undergraduates in the program and they have decided to arrange more of such workshops in the future.
URP is a wonderful concept when looked from the perspective of harnessing the researching potential in youth. This could be strongly recommend to all educational institutions facilitating graduate education to start promoting “Undergraduate Research Program”. If URP is taken as one of the priority, it doesn’t take many years for us (Indians) to over score the number of research patents filed by US.
Subrahmanya bk
Email: aasha.research@gmail.com
Abhijit Sarang, after his pre-university, had many options to choose for his graduation in engineering. Finally, he landed up in mechanical engineering. When asked for the reason, his coolest response was “would like to do something related to machine design”. Means, he had within himself an interest developed to learn and understand more about machine design.
This is not just with Abhijith, there are a certain percentage of students who have taken up their graduation studies not just with the objective of settling on a high paying, glamorous corporate jobs but certainly to satisfy their hunger to learn and understand the subject of their interest.
If we precisely look at the opportunities such students have been offered in order to start and continue their exploration, they have to wait for many semesters to start reading the particular subject of interest and in most of the scenarios they have been thought or guided only from the aspect of scoring some percentage of marks in the examinations. In addition to this, non availability of facilities like good library and a guide or a mentor would gradually fade away the interest and student’s focus would get diverted.
“Undergraduate Research Program” has addressed this issue in a most efficient and effective way. The research is a process of investigation and examination of a subject from a different point of view. It is also a systematic process of collecting and analyzing information to increase the understanding and to communicate that understanding to others.
In this program, the student would start his research work in the filed of his interest during his graduation itself. Master Graduation is no more a basic requirement to start the research.
University of Washington (UW) in US has been running this program very successfully and is popularly known as “URP”. They have devised a well structured approach and the effectiveness could certainly be scaled though the most exciting research projects they have successfully completed.
Pavan Vaswani, an undergraduate researcher in University of Washington (UW), working on one of his most favorite research project "Non-Invasive Determination of Intracranial Pressure by Means of Vibroacoustography”, says “I enjoy research – it usually seems to be the largest contributor to
my education at the UW – and want to do research as a career, so I started as soon as I could. For me, one of the most exciting parts of research is that 'It works!' moment. I would argue it beats out the 'Eureka!' moment.
Jessica E. Salvador, Graduate Staff Assistant – URP, UW, clarifies on minimum age to take up research and says “Usually there is no minimum age as long as the person is a UW student. The level of education required varies by project and often faculty describes what they need”.
The Council of Undergraduate Research in Washington is functioning with the objective of institutionalizing Undergraduate Research. They have designed undergraduate research workshops using a regional approach. The workshops will assist participating institutions in articulating their goals for institutionalizing undergraduate research, as well as developing strategies to achieve these goals on their respective campuses.
Down here, that too in a remote part of Karnataka, The Chintana (North Karnataka) and CSCS (Centre for the Study of culture and Society Bangalore jointly conducted a cultural study workshop at Sirsi (Karnataka) with the objective of teaching research at undergraduate level. About 25 undergraduate students from three different colleges participated in the workshop along with few teaching faculty. Mr. Vivek Dhareshwar (CSCS) expressed his complete satisfaction about the participation of young undergraduates in the program and they have decided to arrange more of such workshops in the future.
URP is a wonderful concept when looked from the perspective of harnessing the researching potential in youth. This could be strongly recommend to all educational institutions facilitating graduate education to start promoting “Undergraduate Research Program”. If URP is taken as one of the priority, it doesn’t take many years for us (Indians) to over score the number of research patents filed by US.
Subrahmanya bk
Email: aasha.research@gmail.com
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