Undergraduate Research
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| Kate Vincek |
In WSU’s undergraduate research program, students pursue new knowledge while learning useful skills for life
At first blush, dance might not seem a productive area for research. Put on a pretty dress, some great shoes and you’re ready, right?
Not really. And the Maggie AlleseeDepartment of Dance has three young women who can prove it. Their work netted them research grants worth $3,050. Working as a team, Martha Dobbs and Kate Vincek researched “solo forms in contemporary choreography: performance and analysis of Jan Van Dyke’s Luna.” Marlo Mysliwiec, researched “dance for the camera.” All three women are mentored by Associate Professor Douglas Risner of the dance department.
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| Marlo Mysliwiec |
The women were among 114 students who presented work at the university’s fifth Undergraduate Research Conference, sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). A small office with a staff of two, OUR invites students from the hard sciences, social sciences, performing arts and humanities to put theory into practice while working on research projects and being mentored by faculty. Most of the proposals come from the sciences, but Kevin Rashid, director of OUR, is happy to see a recent influx of creative projects.
Research is valuable to the students who undertake it for a variety of reasons. Besides learning more about their chosen field, Rashid says, the experiences that the faculty mentor/student relationship enables are critical in the development of students’ skills whether they are artistic or honed in a laboratory.
“The one-to-one ratio of student to mentor is always incredibly powerful for any student,” he says. “For high-performing research-oriented and creative students it allows them to apply knowledge to the real world in ways that rote learning and memorization can’t.”
The research conference is a key part of the program because it provides a venue in which the university can talk to itself, showcasing student accomplishments across disciplines and making some disciplines more aware of each other. Rashid hopes it will lead to more complex and larger, interdisciplinary collaborations.