UAHunstville/NASA Heliophysics REU: Changing Student’s Perspectives on Research

Abstract:

For 4 years scientists at the UAHuntsville CSPAR and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center have hosted 10 NSF funded undergraduate researchers with a focus on heliphysics. Our program makes special effort to recruit and support students without any previous research experience, those from small schools, and students from underrepresented groups. Our program has been highly successful by standards of concert measurements, such as papers published, posters presented and students attending graduate school. Other measures of success are much more difficult to measure. Examples of these ‘soft ‘ measures, are how students feel about their ability to conduct research, their feeling of belonging in science, and a belief in their future in geo science. Here we discuss our findings of the effect of research on soft measures and how students’ perspective changes before and after the program.