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With the passing of Columbus Day weekend, the visitations of prospective students are coming into full swing. Their demands play a significant role in how universities choose to revamp their programs, specifically in areas such as research.
In a recent poll of current undergraduate students from around the country conducted by The New York Times, 90 percent of those surveyed said that reputation was either very or somewhat important when they were weighing their choices on college; 48 percent also said that research opportunities factored into their decision.
With a growing emphasis on both prestige and undergraduate research, often displayed at neighboring universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, the faculty at Boston College finds itself adapting to the changing demands of the future student body.
Mary Crane, chair of Boston College's English department, said, "BC in general would place the emphasis on student formation and on educating the whole person," but she concedes that there is definitely an increasing emphasis and support for research.
Lawrence T. Scott, assistant chairperson in the chemistry department and in his 15th year of teaching, agreed that as BC expands and improves its research facilities and hires more faculty, they are attracting stronger applicants and thus "closing the gap" between themselves and larger research institutions.
Scott acknowledges that there are trade-offs involved when ambitions for research clash with the interests of the student body, but he believes that in the end the research complements the educational experience in the classroom.
In the chemistry department, for example, select students have the opportunity to participate in an accelerated honors track, in which they begin to become involved in a research lab by the second semester of their sophomore year. By the completion of their sophomore year, the students are working in the lab for 10-15 hours each week, and they often continue to do research over the summer and into their junior and senior years. The program culminates with a senior thesis paper.
"Not only do [these students] have the opportunity to work at the master's level, but they're really able to accomplish something," Scott said. "It's not me running these experiments but the undergraduate and graduate students working in the lab."
Universities such as Harvard and the University of California Berkeley place huge importance on publishing; the published paper details research that is regarded as a breakthrough in the professional field of chemistry.
This is also the case at BC, where studies are also making an impact outside of academic circles. The professors are not the only ones getting the credit, either. The students who contribute to the research and help in drafting the papers get their name on the final version as well, Scott said.
Allison Greene, a first-year graduate student working in Scott's lab and GA&S '15, is a beneficiary of the expanding opportunities for research at BC. As an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, Greene joined a lab in her sophomore year and said that she chose to come to BC to continue her studies because she "wanted to do research, and BC had a good, competitive program."
Greene said that being able to do research as an undergraduate student helped her a great deal. "It helped a huge amount in the transition to grad school … and being able to balance research and studies and now teaching." Greene, along with several other first-year graduate students, serves as a teaching assistant for the freshmen chemistry labs.
Now, as a graduate student, "everything's available - there aren't too many limitations [in the lab]," Greene said.
Despite the tremendous research opportunities for research provided by BC for its undergraduates, the more extensive research projects are limited to the minority of students participating in the honors program. Coupled with the fact that there are over 500 students taking intro-level chemistry alone, the emphasis must remain on the general education of the undergraduate population and on "closer one-on-one contact with the faculty," Scott said.
Crane, who has been at BC for 21 years and currently teaches one class each semester in addition to her duties as department chair, said that as research becomes more prevalent, it must be done "without sacrificing attention to the undergraduate education."
In her department, the professors believe in the importance of students improving their reading and writing skills; honing in on those skills ideally takes small classes and a level of personal attention that is lost with larger class sizes.
Crane believes that some element of the core curriculum is vital to the formation of complete students, and that it needs to be coupled with the faculty being available to work hands-on with their students.
"Boston College needs to be sure that as research becomes more important, that the quality of teaching remains important," Crane said.
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