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The impact of undergraduate research at Utah State

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The cover art for Future Casting with Utah State features white and light blue text on a dark blue background.

Utah State University’s undergraduate research program is the 2nd oldest of its kind in the nation, and it turns 50 in 2025. To showcase these five decades of impactful research, USU has declared 2025 the Year of Undergraduate Research.

Alexa Sand, associate vice president in the Office of Research, and Sara Goeking, a USU and undergraduate research alumna, join President Cantwell to talk about how the program changes lives and its legacy at Utah State.

Sara has three degrees from USU: B.S. in Environmental Studies and Plant Science, 1996; M.S. in Forest Ecology, 2003; Ph.D. Watershed Sciences 2022. She is currently a Forest Inventory and Analysis National Program Manager, based in Logan but affiliated with the Washington office of the Forest Service. She was a stellar grad student and has been active in the American Geophysical Union, which awarded her an Editor’s Choice award in 2022 for the “extremely high quality and significance” of her publication on streamflow response to forest disturbance in the West. In 2023, she was recognized for her work with the Women in Forest Carbon Initiative. She’s generally recognized as a leading researcher on western forests, and her work is very representative of one of USU’s great strengths, its partnership with the U.S. Forest Service in studying and ensuring the sustainability of the west’s forestlands. Learn more about Sara.

Alexa is an associate vice president for the Office of Research and a professor of art history in the USU Caine College of the Arts. She oversees USU’s undergraduate research program. Alexa earned a B.A. in Art History and Anthropology from Williams College (1991) and an M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1999) in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Dr. Harvey Stahl. A medievalist, her outside fields were in French literature and late-medieval European history. Learn more about Alexa.

full transcript

Elizabeth Cantwell  00:03
Hello and welcome to “Future Casting with Utah State.” I'm Elizabeth Cantwell, president of Utah State University, and the host of this podcast. Today I'm talking to Alexa Sand and Sarah Goeking about USU’s undergraduate research program. It's been going on for a long time, so it has a legacy that we can actually talk about and impact that we can point to. Alexa is Associate Vice President in the Office of Research and a professor of art history, and she oversees the undergraduate research program. Sarah is a USU alumna and an alumna of the undergraduate research program as well. So she's got three degrees from Utah State University, and we're going to have this conversation just as Utah State University is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary of this program. So we've been in the business of research for a long time. We've been in the business of bringing undergraduates to our research for 50 years, and to honor this legacy, we've declared this the year of undergraduate research. So welcome to both of you. But I thought I would start with you, Alexa, and just kind of what our listeners have their idea of what research is. But we're going to kind of delve into what is undergraduate research. Why is it different from other flavors of the undergraduate experience, and how does it drive the perspective that we think at least some, if not all of our undergraduates should have on what life is all about?

Alexa Sand  01:36
Those are great questions, and I'm really happy to be here to answer them. So thank you. I mean, one of, one of the things that we sort of begin with when we talk about undergraduate research is high impact learning experiences, or high impact practices in higher ed. And since the early 2000s this idea that students learn best, or in fact, all humans learn best by actually doing the things that they're learning about. So that active and engaged learning is a really fundamental part of undergraduate research. Undergraduates who are engaged in research at Utah State are working with faculty mentors, with graduate student mentors, and that mentorship is also a really key element in the experience, because it builds a relationship of trust, of personal development and of growth. So I think those are two of the characteristics of undergraduate research, that engagement in the actual things that you're learning about doing, rather than sitting on your butt in a seat taking notes, and then the personal development that comes from having somebody who's more experienced in the field sort of guide you and listen to you and really see you as a person. So undergraduate research is first and foremost about people and their relationships with one another.

Elizabeth Cantwell  02:56
I feel obligated to point to the fact that our faculty who engage in this don't sort of get extra credit there that we really come with a an ethos at this university of people who want to make this extra contribution to undergraduates experience. And Sarah, I'll ask you kind of about that lived experience, but I am always in awe of the the large number of faculty that we have who are willing to step up and provide that mentorship and actually do that. Yes, absolutely, it's it's really cool to watch.

Alexa Sand  03:35
I think our faculty are part of a culture in 2020 we actually won a national award for excellence in undergraduate research, and when we were putting together the materials to apply for that award, we had to show that we had a culture that was campus wide and deeply embedded. And it was easy to do at USU, because undergraduate researchers are part of our research community. They're not sort of sitting out in a separate little unit. I mean, you mentioned at the beginning, I'm an Associate Vice President for Research. I don't only deal with student research, but the fact that student research is located in our Office of Research, rather than maybe under the chief academic officer or out in one of the colleges. I mean, it's happening in all those places, but the fact that we recognize these students as an integral part of our research operation is, I think, really, really significant and important.

Elizabeth Cantwell  04:26
But for all you faculty out there listening, we see you, oh yeah, and are so grateful for you. So Sarah, you you've sort of, you've got the whole, the full monty of the USU experience. But I'm really interested in what the lived experience was like to as an undergraduate, get exposed to this, and then take it into your career, and as a tell our listeners kind of what you do, because I think it's, it's illuminating as to sort of where that experience can take you and what it means. You know, we hear so much today about degrees need to lead to jobs and. Yeah, I would argue that experiences also need to lead to jobs.

Sara Goeking  05:04
Yeah, I would agree with that as well. That's these are all great questions, I would say, to start just on a personal level, the way that the undergraduate research program affected me was that I went from being a first generation college student to doing this research project with, I think this matters, a female mentor who helped me see that I did belong at the university, not just as a student in a classroom, you know, in a sea of chairs, you know, staring at the professor in the front of the room, but actually doing the work. Mary Barkworth, if you're listening, I hope you know the tremendous impact that you had on me as a mentor. She was the director of the Intermountain herbarium at the time, and I got to do this project that was, you might remember Alexa from coming across it. It was the multi entry, dichotomous key to the deciduous opposite leaved woody twigs of northern Utah, which meant that I had to spend a lot of time collecting twigs in winter. And I went out with Mary, and she did this, you know, she took the time to work with me on it. I had to decide what characteristics I saw that I could also express in a way that any other user of this key that I was developing could use to identify the twig that they were looking at, maybe in their yard or out on a hike. And then I also got to code it into a computer program. So this was really, you know, multi faceted in terms of the skills, but, you know, on a personal level, seeing that I did belong in research, and then sparking my sense of wonder in the natural world has really stuck with me, and that has driven a lot of the choices that I've made since then. It's also shaped my my propensity to stay in research, and the fact that I was developing a key not just for specialists, but for you know, like you know, anybody out there that is curious about what plants they're looking at. It made me think about how I could do work that was useful to people and seemed valuable to people as well. So what I do now? You did ask me. I'll get you there. So now I am the National Program Manager for our nation's nationwide forest inventory for the US Forest Service, and I'm also adjunct and wild land resources. And I started with that program as a crew leader in the field, measuring trees, hiking and carrying a backpack. And I had a master's degree from Utah State at that point, and it was just, I won't hide this. I'm 50 years old, and at the age of 42 I decided that I wanted to go back to school and get a PhD. And I looked at lots of institutions, and ended up deciding that there was a professor, a mentor, that was a really good fit here at Utah State. And it was a fantastic experience. And so I'm still learning and still sparking a sense of wonder.

Elizabeth Cantwell  08:00
And how much do you think that undergraduate experience gave you the idea that this, or the permission that this kind of lifelong I mean, it's called lots of things, but lifelong learning, or like you don't have to stop at some point. Do you think that played a role in your willing, your willingness to getting a doctorate is not easy.

Sara Goeking  08:26
No, it's not. Yeah, that definitely, that definitely played a role. And I think the role that it played really was thinking about, you know, what questions could I ask, and showing me, especially working with Mary as a mentor, you can get paid to do this and make it a career. It's not just something that you do because it's fun and interesting and, you know, sparking your sense of wonder is good for you. So up to that point, you know, again, as a first-generation college student, I thought, well, you have to do something that you can get paid for.

Elizabeth Cantwell  09:02
And that just always useful.

Sara Goeking  09:05
Sometimes critical for most of us. Yes, and it blew open the, you know, my view of the possibilities of what you could, you know, make your life work.

Elizabeth Cantwell  09:14
Alexa, give us some other I know from looking at our undergraduate research sort of inventory and peaking a little bit here and there at the data. You know, I think a lot of people think about research as either stem focused exclusively, stem focused like or kind of standing in front of a lab bench, pouring chemicals, not putting on a backpack and and going out in the winter snow multiple times a week. But can you just give us a sense of that breadth you're you're well steeped in this?

Alexa Sand  09:51
Yes, absolutely. I think I loved the the experience that you had, Sarah, because that, to me, really illustrates so many things about. About undergraduate research at Utah State is very much about being part of a research community, about getting your hands dirty or your feet wet, or any of these things, because we do a lot of research in the field. We have students out there, summer, winter, fall and spring, mucking about in streams and digging up the tundra in Alaska and collecting rainforest frogs in Central America. But we also have a lot of students from outside the STEM disciplines, and just yesterday, we held our fall Student Research Symposium. Over 250 undergraduate students presenting their work. There were projects on everything from a 16th century English translation of Bucha Decameron to strategies for extracting ooo sites from the ovaries of slaughtered pigs. I mean, it was pretty broad. I have a couple of projects, though, that I think are really, really exciting right now, let's hear about so the first one, I mean, it's hard to pick just one or two, because there are so many interesting ones, but these are both fairly recent projects. Last year, we funded an Erco, or an undergraduate research and creative opportunities grant, which is a scholarship plus research money that we give to students, we funded this project by two students, one Rivka Hopner, who's an econ and finance major, and the other Christina Kirwasa, who's a Watershed Sciences major, and also, I should note, a Goldwater scholar. So, a pretty big deal. These two students were working with a faculty member from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Dr Stacia rider, so they were looking at attitudes in Cache Valley, right here in our own community, towards decarbonization and alternative Energy. Where are the sticking points. What don't people understand? What are they concerned about? You know, how can we sort of build community understanding and support for a sustainable energy future so a very applied, very community engaged, and above all, the interdisciplinarity of that, to me, is just iconic for undergraduate research at Utah State, and frankly, it would be great if there were more projects being conducted at all levels by graduate students, by faculty that had that characteristic of being super community embedded and super interdisciplinary and also collaborative. That project really stands out for me. Another one I'm very excited about has gotten some media attention, is led by Dr Christine Cooper Rampado in the English department, and she has worked with a sort of evolving team of undergraduates. She's taken the STEM lab model and translated it into the humanities. So she's working with these history and folklore and English undergrads who are tracing the history of African American visitors to Utah from basically the early 20th century up to now, especially as it intersects with our national parks. So again, a really engaged sort of field based research. They're out there looking at archives, talking to people. The students are almost all themselves, first generation students, so that's pretty cool. They're getting published. Several of them have actually gone on to pursue graduate study. So it's sort of that empowering these students who might come to college thinking, oh, you know, I'll get a college degree and then I'll get, you know, a nine to five job, and it's all going to be good, and that's fine, but I think we miss out on a lot of talent if that's all we do, because there are all these people with passion and energy and creativity, and it's great to sort of open the door for them to walk through.

Elizabeth Cantwell  13:53
Part of what you said, Sarah, that opening the door for for me is that there, there is more that any of you can do than merely get a degree and go to work for somebody else, your brain, your mind, and the way that you think can be part of an enormous number of outcomes and solutions, even if you don't use The research experience as an undergraduate in your career, you you have been given permission to use your mind to create some new form of knowledge, something new that isn't other people can use. And it's knowledge. It's not, oh, I'm going to go, you know, yeah.

Alexa Sand  14:33
I mean, absolutely, when somebody, when employers, are looking for employees, especially, you know, sort of employers in the innovation industries, whether that's, you know, media or technology or engineering, either looking a lot of times for people with what are sometimes called the soft skills. And I think soft skills makes them sound easy, but they're not. They're actually the hard things that you learn. Earn in college, and particularly through undergraduate research. Teamwork. Number one, that's hard, yes, yeah. And like, problem solving on your own can be fun, but problem solving in a group can be frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. So I think, you know, that's probably one of those skills communication. We have a strict requirement for all of our programs, whether it's a four year scholarship or, you know, a one semester internship, that at the end of that experience, students need to do something to disseminate their research. And that's why we have fall and spring student research symposia, so that the students have an opportunity to get that and to learn about how to become better communicators. Because I think if you learn the skills to be a better communicator of your research and your learning, you also become a better listener, and you can kind of read between the lines or listen between the words for deeper meanings or maybe problematic issues with things that are being put out there.

Elizabeth Cantwell  16:07
Sarah, are you a manager of people?

Sara Goeking  16:10
I have been of large groups of people, and now I am not formally a supervisor, but I am one of those influence without authority people.

Elizabeth Cantwell  16:21
So, you know, the reason I asked is because it seems to me that the teamwork learning, or the being a mentee or eventually a mentor, is an incredible set of skills for not just being in a team, but providing some flavor of leadership towards an outcome that you can see that other people can't see.

Sara Goeking  16:43
Absolutely, I completely agree with that, and I think that a lot of times it requires forming a vision. And Alexa, you mentioned communication, one thing that I spend a lot of brain space on is figuring out, like, what is the big why behind whatever I am trying to get our national program to do, communicating the big why. And often, if I do that successfully, it doesn't matter that I'm not the direct supervisor of people. They're willing to, you know, join in the effort and make something happen.

Elizabeth Cantwell  17:17
So I have actually lots of sort of down in the weeds questions, but I want to make sure we give between each of you, with your unique perspectives, enough time to this intersection between the undergraduate research experience and what you do in at work. Because for me, at least, that's part of the communication that I have to do, and we have to do at at even higher levels in Utah regarding the value of research itself, this kind of the ideation of new knowledge is itself a skill that translates to better capacity, kind of across the board in the American workplace, whether you're a coder or whether you're a twig identifier. Now I'm going to look at twigs. I have this child. I have a child who is sort of canonically a twig identifier. So if I find a twig, I send her a picture of it, and I go, What is this? Could be a spider. It could be a cloud in the sky. It's like, here's the answer. I figured this out.

Sara Goeking  18:25
That's fantastic. So there's a sense of wonder there

Elizabeth Cantwell  18:28
About the whole of the visible world.

Sara Goeking  18:31
Yeah, that curiosity and ideation of new knowledge and having an idea of what is possible, yeah, is important. I've also realized not, I guess I started developing this skill in my undergraduate research and am still even now working to refine it. But how do you ask the right question that is answerable and, and you know, answerable with, you know, a concrete, definitive answer, even if it also raises more questions, ideally in a way that's also either useful, just in terms of, you know, generating basic scientific knowledge, or an application that actually can help the world. There are so many big challenges in the world. You know, you mentioned the energy future earlier, and I think about that. I think about what's going on in our western forests and all the mortality going on, and that has an effect on our water supply. That's something that I've been studying, that is just one of many big challenges facing us as a society. And I think that we need, we need lots of creativity to figure out the best questions to ask and the ways of addressing those challenges. Alexa, you also mentioned communication and communicating research outcomes, and I think that that is a foundational part. Of learning to be a good researcher is realizing that, you know, it's really, it is really fun, you know, to do research for Research's sake, but to make it useful, I think you really have to share it out into the world. And so learning that that is part of the process, and learning the communication up front is tremendous. And my experience at Utah State doing undergraduate research was that that undergraduate research program took, you know, my Utah State experience from being sort of a typical undergrad bachelor's degree experience to being something really tailored to what I was interested in. And I learned far more than I could have ever guessed I was going to do.

Elizabeth Cantwell  20:43
We have students who engage in undergraduate research who must go through any aspect of the proposal development process or the funding development process. It's one thing to communicate a result or a process, even it's another to try and get somebody to understand enough to be willing to provide part. And I know undergraduate researchers don't write their own, but I know my curious daughter was part of an undergraduate research program where where she had to write the part of a proposal that was the part that would go to the IRB, which, for our listeners is the is the board at any research institution that determines that the approach to dealing with human beings meets not just legal mandates, but is ethical and and and and meets scientific and research criteria? Do we have those experiences? Or any of our students get those experiences? I mean, my experience is that's like, really golden in terms of translatable to lots of different types of jobs, absolutely.

Alexa Sand  21:48
And actually, I don't think I really, because I come from the humanities, I didn't really appreciate how unusual it is that at Utah State, we treat our undergraduate researchers like members of the like members of the research community, and so they're expected to do these things. I mean, obviously mentors play a big role in giving them guidance and sort of going, don't do that. You know, take it over here. But our flagship program, which is the Erco program, undergraduate research and creative opportunities. That's the program that President Glenn Taggart, started in 1975 it asks students to write a proposal, a research proposal. They have to have a budget, they have to have a timeline, they have to justify the feasibility and the significance of the project, whether it's composing an opera about climate change or whether it's, you know, isolating a chemical in a more traditional bench science. So the student there is the lead researchers the PI and is playing that role, and they go through a rigorous review process with, you know, anonymous outside reviewers, who are usually volunteers from our faculty. Again, another way, again, yes, and also graduate students. We have advanced graduate students involved in that, and they get feedback, and, you know, they don't always get funded. We have about a 50% funding rate right now. It varies depending on how many applications we get in a cycle. And we don't fund anything that doesn't seem feasible. I mean, even if we have money left over, I'm not going to give money to a student who hasn't really fully thought through the process. So it's an iterative process, just like applying for funding from a federal agency. I've now put in my share of, weirdly enough, NSF and Department of Education grants, and, you know, still trying, we'll get there someday. But I think, you know, I think at that small level, they're already learning the proposal writing and the sort of project management thinking that is going to be so valuable to them, whether or not they go on in a research career. I mean, if you're working for an engineering firm, for example, that's doing civil engineering for a highway project, you have to write the same kinds of documents right to get them past the you know, the Department of Transportation or whoever is reviewing them. So in any case, I think that kind of persuasive data based writing is definitely baked into the experience. Now, students have also served as co authors on federal grant published papers and state grants. One of the examples I love to trot out, and Ryan will laugh at me because it's getting kind of stale, but Dr Ryan Jackson in chemistry and biochemistry with a graduate PhD student last summer published in the journal Nature, which is like the big daddy of all science journals, right? Who were the co authors on that paper? His undergraduates and some of those undergraduates had been with the project from the proposal writing stage, so they saw the whole life cycle of a scientific a funded science. Scientific project, and I think that's a unique experience for an undergraduate. And whether those students go on and get a PhD in chemistry or biochemistry, or whether they go into industry, as you know, industry scientists or even sales reps, they have an understanding of how science happens, how new knowledge is created that's just unparalleled.

Elizabeth Cantwell  25:23
Well, I do think there's a difference, and they go together. What you said, Sarah, about you know, am I asking a question that's good in all the different ways? Is it answerable? Is it going to is it going to move? But then, can I actually convince somebody else of that fact? Because I could imagine you start with a good question, and you could just write a book about it. You could write a novel or fiction, and it would still have been generated by a really good question. Or you can write a proposal that's fundable. And let me just say that takes a lot of work. Having done a number of those, you also learn grit, right? Because the first three times you write it, you get declined.

Alexa Sand  26:09
Resilience is one of the resilience one of those quote, unquote, soft skills that you know undergraduate researchers take out there, and they're, they're kind of used to, I don't want to say failure, because failure sounds so negative. But they're used to things not working out their work. They're used to coming into to their project after, you know, the weekend, and finding out that all the specimens melted, right? Or, you know, in the case of the opera students they had, you know, created this whole artistic work, and they were ramping up to perform it. When the COVID pandemic hit, they pivoted and turned it into one of the first successful all, zoom, zoom based performances, I mean, of any kind, not just here at Utah State, but anywhere. Yeah, they performed an opera from their living rooms.

Sara Goeking  26:58
That is persistence and, I think that that's actually, that's, that's a really, you mentioned persistence earlier, and I think that that's another really key characteristic, some a strength that people build through this process. And you know, when you mentioned that you might write it three times and be declined before, you know, on a on a grant proposal, there's also, that's persistence, but also that's leadership, you know, convincing people that your idea is good, and framing it in such a way that's convincing they can hear it, yeah, and then taking it all through the process. Alexa, when you when you talked about, you know, the full life cycle of research, I recall having to write a report at the end of my project, and I knew that was coming. And even though that was my first research project, I thought this is up to me to lead this show and make sure that I accomplish something out of it, so that persistence, you know, not giving up and having the challenges and working through them.

Alexa Sand  27:55
Yeah, I just love watching the students who come in through our undergraduate research fellows program, which is a four year program. They have a scholarship. They start out so green and so uncertain. They're enthusiastic. They've signed up for this program, right? But by the end, they're quite frequently running a whole section of a lab, or, you know, developing these projects that have nothing to do with their mentors, specific area of research, their their own thing. We had one who just went off to graduate school, but she developed a kind of therapeutic module for people who have trauma related to immigration, and it's a sort of family therapy module which became nationally adopted before she was even out of her undergraduate degree. This young woman started out so quiet and self effacing and sort of sitting in the back seat, not wanting to take a leadership role, and now she is this sort of superstar in the field of psychology in which she's working. It's it's always inspirational to see how it empowers people to to take on that leadership role.

Elizabeth Cantwell  29:13
I'm always reminded that we undervalue the intellectual contributions of our undergraduates. We still the model is still often you come to us as students, and we impart knowledge to you, and there is an enormous amount of capacity that our undergraduate students have to deliver for us and society, far more than we allow them to deliver an undergraduate research program is work on the part of all the people who participate it. It isn't something you just sort of slide in, and students can do it in a spare hour a week, and faculty can do it. And it's, it really is the subject of determined service. Yeah, but I am, I am always mindful that we have so much more we could learn from the young people who come to share forward as whatever number of years with us, as they have a lot to give. Yeah,

Sara Goeking  30:14
Yeah, I think, I think you're right about that. Well, I know you're right about that. And one thing that I see in in my my career with the Forest Service, also I see that I see a similar thing, where people that consider themselves, the senior experts you know, often see this huge trade off in do I spend the time, you know, invest time in empowering people with less experience to do more, and that does take time on the front end, but I think in the long run, our capacity goes way up. We can do more research and have a greater impact with more people working on the problems we're addressing.

Elizabeth Cantwell  30:55
One of the things we do here is we really give our faculty credit for their participation in undergraduate research. Not all institutions of higher learning do that. It's part of, it's our long history. I think people get raised that way. Part of it's just the culture coming out of the research office, meaning it's part of the almost expectation. So you do get some version of credit.

Alexa Sand  31:20
Yes, doing that. I mean, it's built into our promotion and tenure process too, that, you know, the activities that we engage in as faculty mentors of graduate and undergraduate students are valued, you know, from the point of view of our teaching record, so that, you know you can document. How many ercos have you missed? How many times have you come and served as a volunteer at our research symposium, and you know, given students feedback on their presentations, all of these actions by faculty. And in fact, I was just talking with our Director of Communications today about the idea of maybe creating a sort of badging system, and we're always thinking of like new ways to really recognize that this is not, as you say, it's not easy work, it's important work, and it can be very productive for our own research outcomes. But it's also, you know, there's an element of emotional labor. Students are learners, and they are not always confident, and they're not always, you know, completely sure how to handle a situation. They make a mistake, they don't know who to tell or how to deal with that. And so you're constantly kind of back at that ground level. But honestly, I think that keeps us humble as scientists, as scholars, because you're constantly reminded that this is really challenging, really complex work that we're asking people to engage in.

Elizabeth Cantwell  32:52
But we live in a really complex world where the challenges are massively complicated. Alex, give us a you know, we sometimes expose our undergraduate researchers to all kinds of things, like legislators, oh yes, or, you know, other what's the value for them of being able to be interact with undergraduate researchers? Because I know you've done this a lot, yes.

Alexa Sand  33:15
So every year, we take a group of our undergraduate researchers down to the spring legislative session at Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City and the University of Utah. The other r1 in Utah brings their students, and we, you know, kind of take over the road set

Elizabeth Cantwell  33:36
Up in the amazing Rotunda. It's beautiful.

Alexa Sand  33:41
The students are there for almost six hours on their feet, on that hard floor, talking to legislators, staffers, the public, lobbyists, the press. First of all, they are always so impressive. They are always so impressed. They are so articulate. They're so passionate. I think in some ways, they're our best ambassadors, but also just they're so they're so cool, you want to be with them. But what's the benefit to them? I think for a lot of them, that's a moment where it where the sort of rubber hits the road. It all gets real. They've been doing this work, they've been thinking of themselves as students, but now they're ambassadors. Now they're representatives of Utah State University, and they're representatives of their discipline. And I think in terms of identity formation and confidence, that moment is really significant. And I've heard students say that again and again, like, wow, that was really cool. I will never think the same way about talking about my research in public, like I'm I am now an official professional. You know, I think it's a great, transformative experience for them. It can be hard too, because they'll get challenged.

Elizabeth Cantwell  34:57
So for both of you, I'm gonna veer off. Have a little bit, but I and we hear a lot about whether or not we can provide our undergraduate students with more experiential learning. So not just with our own research, on our own researchers, but company experience and or I would just say experiences with partnerships that we have to develop outside the institution and the there are, there are two challenges with that. One is just that entities that aren't us don't necessarily have the same value proposition embedded in the job descriptions of their employees, and so thinking about all of the things that we've described through the lens of their enterprise, I think would be a great undergraduate research project, but maybe I'm asking each of you to just you know you from the experience of the work that you've done, and whether you Brought in undergraduate researchers or not. How do we take this value and expand the portfolio of those who offer it to our students? And I know none of us are experts in this area. Honestly, I've run, you know, student programs with specific companies that that bring in 10 students over the summer and create a real experience for them, as opposed to a stapler and Xerox or experience. But does that you work for the federal government, which used to do a lot of this, by the way, absolutely, and has fallen off the on that over time.

Sara Goeking  36:40
I don't know whether it's a cost cutting measure or I would love to see more of that. And in fact, in the program that I work for, we do a lot of our work through university partners. And Utah State University is a partner. We have. We have many others, though, too. And a lot of times, if we have something that we want to accomplish or need to accomplish. A lot of times our partners can do it more flexibly, especially if it's something where here is, you know, here's a tangible project that would be great for a student to address. And so it does require thinking creatively and flexibly, being adaptable, and a lot of times having relationships built between teams, between organizations. And I think one way that we've been able to build some of those relationships is through events like, you know, you mentioned the Day at the Capitol, other events that that, you know, maybe events that target outside partners specifically to bring them in. And, you know, maybe around colleges. I know I was in the College of the Quinte College of Natural Resources, and I know that there has historically been a lot more involvement with the federal government there, and I would love to see more of that. And that's that's part of the reason that I thought it would be a great thing to become an adjunct faculty member.

Alexa Sand  38:00
Yes, right now we're in the process of planning our spring semester, summer research opportunities, fair. So this is very much on my mind, and one of the things that we really try to do there is not just highlight. You know, you could, you could work in Professor X's lab, but here's an REU at Carnegie Mellon University. Or here's an experience with Ray THON that's, you know, hiring summer interns. We try to look specifically for paid positions for our students, because, as you mentioned, a lot of our students are like you Sarah, first generation. Or if they're not first generation, they're still, you know, the great American middle class. You cannot go for a summer and pay for housing and not get paid. So we really do focus as we're pulling those opportunities together for that fair we really look for things that will be compensated and that will be valuable for our students. And again, we count on faculty so much for this, the faculty, the college staff, and just, you know, the programs that they've also been running. Another entity I haven't mentioned, but that I think is really important to tip the hat to, is extension, because they provide a ton of opportunities for our students and some of our statewide faculty really take students from not just from their statewide campus, but from the Logan campus and distance to they take them out in the field in the summer, and they're really engaging them, you know, deeply in the work that they're doing. So I think, I think we need to continue to build those relationships and find new partners. But I think there are actually a lot of students every summer, and one of my projects has been to kind of gather that information who are out there and really doing stuff. Our partnership, of course, with SDL, is very important that way, and we actually work very closely with them to place students.

Elizabeth Cantwell  39:56
So SDL is the Space Dynamics Lab, which is our. Or arc and does an amazing job with undergraduates and graduate students. So for all of you who are listening out there who work in companies in our area, think about my homework assignment is to think about how this kind of undergraduate research experience that we've been talking about can become a corporate research experience, and that you can learn as much from your undergraduates as our faculty learn from our undergraduates, because it's really when you allow that to happen, there's an amazing amount of new information that young people will deliver for you, and, goodness knows, our economy really needs all of that kind of new thinking. So last minute thoughts for us as we sort of start to tail down on the podcast here.

Alexa Sand  40:55
Well, when I think about the sort of connection between university learning and careers. And I should note that I I took a hiatus from my academic career and worked for a business to education company that provided precisely this information about how do college majors map onto not jobs, but careers like lifelong endeavors. It was great, you know, three years of my life, but I think it's really important that we appreciate sort of where I started, the interdisciplinarity of research learning at Utah State. So we have a student right now who is using AI to understand how people learn music and how we can better coach students who are learning piano. So here's a young woman who has a great deal of understanding of AI. She's a music major. You might want to look beyond the primary major listed on a student's CV and think more about what the broader scope of their learning is. Because especially with this generation of learners, I think they're very they're very labile. They can move from being, you know, artists, to being technologists in just a matter of months, and they get that they're incredibly good at learning new things.

Elizabeth Cantwell  42:12
But it's also that says a lot about how we coach them to state their skills and capacities for the world to see, because AI is probably analyzing your resume, or your, yeah, whatever you put out there about you. Absolutely. That has changed a lot. So, Sara, any last thoughts for us on I mean, I think your your career has been, I mean, to me, is just such a great example of learning that the generation of knowledge is a thing that you can actually make money doing yes and then taking that through this kind of long tail. I mean, I didn't get my doctorate until I was 36 so, but I never questioned that that might not be something that I could do if I wanted to.

Sara Goeking  43:01
But it's not a it's not always a linear path. Yeah, and I think that a lot of the skills that we've talked about today translate into just having a really satisfying and productive career, whether it's in research or not. I think you know, for any students listening, including high school students. The fact that Utah State University has all these opportunities really elevates the quality of education that you can get here, you know, by these other research opportunities and so, so seize those opportunities. And then I would say to anyone who is considering, you know, being a mentor, whether it's faculty or possible external partners, you know, you might, you might think, Oh, I don't have time for that, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, you have a big workload, and they're burned out. And I would just say to that you really need the inspiration that working with undergraduate students can give you, that can really be a jump start to your passion.

Elizabeth Cantwell  43:58
Yeah, absolutely. You almost can't afford not to, because of the inspirational value.

Alexa Sand  44:03
Yeah, absolutely from that buzzing, yeah. And I mean, it's exhausting for for me and for my team. It's a big production, but I don't care. I love it. It's just 100% inspiration.

Elizabeth Cantwell  44:20
So if you have ideas and thoughts for us, let us know. Think most of you can figure out how to get in touch with me, and I will figure out who to share that knowledge and information with. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Sarah, thank you. Alexa, this has been, this is one of my little passion areas, because it is the place where a little bit of extra effort yields just incredible results. So, thank you guys.

Future Casting with Utah State is a production of Utah Public Radio and Utah State University sponsored by the Office of the President. Thanks to Justin Warnick, the USU Marketing and Communications team, and producer Hannah Castro.

Before coming to Utah State University, Elizabeth Cantwell was the senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of Arizona, where she was responsible for an $825 million annual research portfolio; the 1,268-acre UA Tech Park, one of the nation’s premier university research parks; and a research and innovation enterprise that spanned 20 academic colleges with locations across Arizona, 12 university-level centers and institutes, and other major research-related affiliated organizations conducting classified and contractual work.