The URSA Engage Program includes all types of faculty members. Many professional faculty might be thinking – but I don’t do research! While you may not consider your position to be centered in research, you likely have research components integral to your units that students could help with (and benefit from!), such as needs assessments & program evaluation.
Do you have a question that you don’t know the answer to? Do you need to collect data or information to answer that question? Bingo! A major goal of the program is for students to learn basic research skills (e.g. designing surveys, writing literature reviews, navigating IRB, synthesizing data, analyzing data, drawing conclusions, writing reports/grants, collaborating, etc.). We define research broadly as “the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of existing knowledge in a new and creative way so as to generate new concepts, methodologies and understandings.” Some may disagree with this definition, but if there’s a time to be flexible about how we define research, that time is now. Students who enroll at OSU expect (and deserve) to have experiences beyond the classroom. Moving to remote teaching and learning is making it difficult for early-career students to make important connections with faculty outside of class time. The URSA Engage Program helps facilitate these important (and often transformative) partnerships. We would love to have you listed as one of our faculty partners who is ready to mentor an early-career student this school year!
Here are some examples of projects completed by professional faculty and URSA Engage students in past years: