When asked what they did over their summer vacation, 71 accomplished high school students from around the globe will be able to say they did important hands-on research under the mentorship of UCSB faculty members, postdocs, and advanced graduate students.
RMP students Alexandra Wen, left, and Abigail Chua, right, work with grad student mentor Emily Ellis to extract ostracods, tiny crustaceans sometimes known as sea shrimp. Credit: Sonia Fernandez, OPACFor six weeks this summer, the students participated in UC Santa Barbara's 18th Research Mentorship Program (RMP), in which they conducted graduate-level research, went on field trips, wrote papers, designed posters, honed their written and verbal skills, and presented their results to audiences of their peers, mentors, families, and friends. The projects spanned 18 academic disciplines, including Chicano studies, chemical engineering, physics, and philosophy. The students came from as close as Santa Barbara, and as far away as China, India, Thailand, and Turkey.
In an Office of Public Affairs and Communications (OPAC) news release, Sarah Kang, a junior at San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, said she gained more than just learning how to do research. She studied variances in algae growth response, while other students researched such issues as brain scans, fame in Major League Baseball, and the effects of yellow fever on the South.
RMP Director Lina Kim, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, said the research mentors taught the high school students how to produce research at a graduate level. “Every student coming in is a big fish in a small pond in their high school," she said in the news release. "When they come to UCSB, they come to this huge ocean where there are a lot of bigger fish.”
Research mentor and grad student Andrew MacDonald One of the research mentors, Andrew MacDonald, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, said in a video accompanying the news release:
“It was nice to work with high school students who haven’t been in a college classroom yet. … They’re going to be much better prepared, once they are in that position … to really excel and to choose their preferred path forward once they get there. That has been exciting for me. And also just sharing what I do with some bright young minds has been excellent too.”
Jonathan Suen, a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, said in the release: "I thought they were very talented and I was very impressed by the skill, the motivation, and the willingness of the students to learn.”
Other grad student research mentors included Emily Ellis of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology; and Nikki Marinsek, of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
For more information about the program, read the Office of Public Affairs news release and view the video below.
UCSB's Research Mentorship Program from UC Santa Barbara on Vimeo.