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Stages of Mentoring

4.2 Designing an Undergraduate Research Project

A good research project and a good undergraduate research project are not interchangeable phrases. A good research project will require intense study and may require a few years to yield results. On the other hand, a good undergraduate research project must be tightly structured to allow for improvements and progress over a shorter time frame and to allow modular completion of each part in a semester-by-semester basis.

Breaking down a project into smaller parts is essential for undergraduate research. As such, the generic components of a research project should be comprised of:

  • Research Question: The research question should be as detailed as possible. The answer may be conditional on various factors, but it is general enough to be found directly. If the answer to the question is found through more indirect means, i.e. by inference, this may take a bit more time and must be communicated to the mentee, and the topic must also be within the scope of the mentee’s skills-range.
  • Research Methodology: The research methodology should be designed to elicit answers from a specific niche of the topic being studied. However, the mentor is encouraged to guide the mentee to understand that solutions are often found outside the boundaries of a particular discipline, and may be interdisciplinary in nature.
  • Learning Objectives: The research project should have learning objectives/goals. The learning process may necessitate the acquisition and application of new knowledge, new skills, and new tools by the mentee. How that learning is scaffolded must be part of the mentoring process. Learning is a natural outcome of research. Learning what to do or what not to do can be a valuable experience. Mistakes can be used as opportunities to teach useful lessons. A mistake is a failure only when nothing is learned from it and no corrective action is taken to prevent it from reoccurring.
  • Communicating Research: After the project is completed, the mentee should present the research either orally or in written form or both. The mode of communication should be agreed upon and included in the research plan.

It is imperative that mentees understand that deadlines are important. Deadlines ought to be included in the research plan, and they ought to be reviewed as part of the meetings on research progress. Employers expect employees to be reliable and dependable. Meeting deadlines is part of the expectation in research as well. Undergraduate research projects should be used as a vehicle to teach mentees accountability, responsibility, and consequences.

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A Handbook on Mentoring Students in Undergraduate Research, 2nd Edition Copyright © by Undergraduate Research Committee, New York City College of Technology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.