T4-B: Benefits and Challenges of Undergraduate Research

Undergraduate engineering research provides an avenue for students to gain in-depth experience learning and conducting experiments with a topic related to their specific field of study. The students are exposed to how and why experiments are developed and are able to help solve problems that currently do not have answers. Typically, undergraduate students are not exposed to conducting research until their senior year when they are participating in a capstone project. Working with a research advisor provides the student direct mentoring at a one-on-one level whereas with a capstone project, the students are part of a group, with multiple groups in a section, resulting in the guidance they receive from the capstone course’s instructor being more indirect. Undergraduate research also provides an opportunity for research advisors to guide the students on their path to becoming engineers and help them explore career opportunities that may not otherwise be available. This article describes the benefits of undergraduate research and specifically how the experience has applied to four students. The students of focus for this study are from two 4-year institutions where two students began research as freshmen and two began as sophomores