HHMI Teaching Fellows

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Undergraduate Research Scholars

The HHMI Teaching Fellows who choose mentoring as their focus area mentor undergraduates in the HHMI Undergraduate Research Scholars program. These undergraduates are chosen in a competitive process in which they are evaluated based on grades, letters of recommendation and essays that describe why they want to do research and how they deal with adversity. We match each undergraduate with a graduate mentor and together they design and pursue a research project. We meet with the undergraduates as a group weekly to discuss their research, ask what they consider to be “dumb” questions in a safe forum, discuss recent scientific papers, and learn about career options. They write about their projects and present two short seminars on their work. We spend a substantial amount of time on developing the students’ communication skills. We use an iterative approach to writing in which we point out one writing issue in each iteration and ask them to find as many examples of it in their paper before moving on to the next issue. This past summer, the graduate student mentors suggested that each undergraduate write a letter of recommendation about themselves, and those letters became part of the writing portfolio that each of them created.

Table1. 2002-2003 Undergraduate Research Scholars and Graduate Teaching Fellows

Program	Total Students	Minority Students	Women Students
Undergraduate Research Scholars	15	6/15*	11/15
Teaching Fellows	16	1/16**	10/16

*Minorities were African American, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American
**Minority was African American