Undergraduate Research
Carthage places a major emphasis on undergraduate research. As a Carthage student, you will be challenged to perform original research early and often, under the close guidance of your professors.
Research is built into every student’s experience:
- Research serves as the foundation for entire academic courses.
- Students have access to equipment often reserved for graduate students at other institutions.
- All students must complete a senior thesis in order to graduate. This may be a research project, research paper, art exhibit, major performance, portfolio, or other project.
- The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) offers students in all disciplines paid summer research positions with faculty mentors.
Maybe you will spend a summer building a satellite, adapting a novel into a new play, piloting a college-prep program for high school students, designing a rocket payload, or studying the effects of acute stress on rats. Students selected for the SURE program live on campus, earn a stipend, and gain invaluable experience in their chosen fields.
“I love working in Straz among fellow physics undergrads and professors," said Ashley Marquette '17, who spent a summer building a CubeSatellite. "It feels like I am really doing something more with my college experience.”
Video transcript
There's a variety of ways that students can get into doing research with faculty. So there's of course research throughout the year, they could work with individual faculty. But we have a really thriving summer undergraduate research program.
And so there's the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience program, the "SURE" program, where we take students in. They work 10 weeks side-by-side with a faculty member. We cover their housing, some of their meals, and that really gives them a leg up on other students that may not have those experiences.
Students at Carthage are able to do things that in the past really only graduate students did. That is to work as an individual, or as a small group, with a faculty member on a project that is outside the classroom.
I work with a lot of students who have awesome opportunities in neuroscience and biology. A lot of students who work with non-human subjects research in rat labs, students who work with human participants in our Neuro Physio Lab.
I've been overwhelmed in a good way about the amount of students who are excited to do research in our department. Right now, I have a team of almost 10 research students who work with me. They get to come in and feel some sense of ownership over the research that we do and excitement over their projects. And that's just been really cool.
So I'm actually involved in two research labs at Carthage. One of them is the Psychology of Stress Lab with Dr. Nora McLean in the psychology department. And we're about to start collecting participants for the experiment we've been building for a year and a half, which is super exciting.
So my long-term career goal is to become a Clinical Trial Neuro Psychologist. So already having those strong research skills that I built in undergrad before even going to graduate school, where you typically where most research skills, just mean that my research has been even stronger when I do go into my career.
The amount of work I was actually able to do at Carthage through my research experience did absolutely surprise me. I never thought that this is something that can even be done at an undergraduate level necessarily. So the fact that Carthage offers these kinds of programs I think is a pretty big deal.
