Pilot program in overseas undergraduate research slated for this summer

“This campus has long had undergraduates doing research,” Illinois chemical engineering professor Ed Seebauer said. “It has responded reasonably well to the swelling of demand, however there is still a capacity issue.” Now with the help of Seebauer and fellow professor Paul Diehl, the campus is ready to launch a new venture, which will make it possible for undergraduate students to do that research in other countries and get Illinois credit in the process.

“I recognized there are two itches that this campus needs to scratch, especially with regards to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) undergraduates,” Seebauer said. “One of them is to provide a broader diversity and more kinds of study abroad experiences. The second is that there are more undergraduates who want to do undergraduate research than there is faculty who can possibly fulfill that demand. My thought was to see if we couldn’t harness those drivers in some way and do it at scale.”

Therefore after six years as head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Seebauer set out to help the campus make it a reality. He was appointed Provost Fellow by then provost Dick Wheeler. His mission was to grow and help give shape to the campus-level international programs, both undergraduate and graduate.

It was Gene Robinson, Director of Genomic Biology, who originally suggested the concept of sending students overseas to help build the university’s capacity in that area. Seebauer has worked with Diehl to bring the program to fruition.

“I came to understand study abroad from more of a campus perspective,” Seebauer said of early experience in the Provost’s Office. “It became immediately evident what the needs are as well as the possibilities.”

This summer, after nearly two years of study and preparation, the campus is starting a small pilot. Taking advantage of existing partnerships with KTH and Stockholm University in Sweden through the INSPIRE program, the university is sending two students, one in geology research and one in biochemistry, to Sweden for a six-week undergraduate research experience.

 “It helps that KTH and SU are very strong in research already and that the INSPIRE framework exists together with research interactions that individual faculty have developed at those universities,” Seebauer said on testing the program at KTH and SU. “Therefore, we were able to pick as our test cases, two students who already have research experience on this campus and who are working with faculty who have well-established collaborations with the host lab at SU or KTH.“

The ultimate goal is a program that provides Illinois undergraduate students research opportunities in foreign countries and at the same time give those students U of I credit toward graduation. As far as Seebauer knows, there is no equivalent program operating at large scale among peer institutions.

“We anticipate a lot of these research experiences are going to be mediated through the study abroad office and by the departments, not by individual faculty,” Seebauer said. “Students could do research abroad without necessarily having a sponsoring faculty member. That’s really the goal.”

In order to make it happen, there are a fair number of constraints to work through when done to scale, the first being students wanting to stay on track to graduate on time. The second is quality control, a type of oversight from the campus that isn’t necessary with a typical study abroad experience.

 

“One reason we are doing (the test cases) over a summer is to get around the student-centered constraints of time to graduation,” Seebauer added. “Summer seems to provide the appropriate time period where students can go over for several weeks and have an intensive research experience and yet not so long that it starts impacting other things they may want to do during the rest of the calendar year.”

As far as the administrative oversight is concerned, Seebauer points out that to approve credit for the research experience, there aren’t currently any mechanisms (like a syllabus for approved classes for instance) to establish that the research project is appropriate and that it got done.

“We can envision possible cases where there is not necessarily a research collaboration in place between faculty here and the host institution, so the quality control needs to take place at the department level,” noted Seebauer.

Figuring out how to handle quality control over research in foreign educational institutions where individual faculty on campus don’t have research collaborations or over those done by students in research institutions that aren’t educational entities, are still things that need to be worked out.

“We are trying to set this up to fit a variety of different educational and financial models,” Seebauer said.

This summer’s goal, however, is simply is to resolve the logistical issues of getting students on-site, having them hosted, accomplish some research that is satisfactory to the host, and have it documented appropriately. If successful, then in 2013-14, the program will scale up.

“If you think of this program like an athlete, you have to exercise the muscles,” Seebauer said. “You have to put them through the paces and make sure they all work. From there, you start developing the relational underpinnings at the institutional level to enable sending a test case our two to other kinds of institutions. You want to be conservative at first because you don’t want to be granting Illinois engineering credit for experiences that don’t merit it.”

While there are definitely those “itches” from the student side, there are from the demand side as well where corporations and graduate schools would like to see students with both of these experiences.

“This kind of program allows you to scratch both of these itches,” Seebauer said. “This is the multi-institutional PhD program (that chemical engineering maintains with National University of Singapore) aimed at the undergraduate level. It’s an idea whose time has come.”
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CONTACT: Edmund Seebauer, Provost Fellow, 217/333-6677

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Mike Koon, writer/editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-1256.