Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Winter 2002

Taking the Honors
have to promote their work through journal publications and conference
presentations.”
One of the ways in which the Cain Project supports students’ progress
toward this goal is by helping students plan and practice presentations.
Teaching students to give effective presentations is perhaps the Cain
Project’s most important function at RUSP. That’s because every student
has to give detailed presentations on his or her project twice during the
course of the semester. And in some cases, they will be addressing students
who have only the vaguest idea of what they’re talking about, so they have
to communicate very clearly indeed.
The students’ first presentation comes late in the fall semester. The
previous spring, when they applied for acceptance to RUSP, the students
had to turn in both the name of the faculty adviser who was going to mentor
them in a weekly series of meetings and a preliminary sketch of their
research proposal.
The students will likely have decided on their proposal after talking to their
potential mentors. “They usually pick an adviser they like and whose work
they’re interested in,” says Kinsey, “and then say, ‘I’d like to do
undergraduate research with you.’ The faculty member will usually suggest
a not-very-detailed range of subjects.”
Different fields have very different ways of conducting research, and each
student is encouraged to do research in the manner of his or her major or in
the style of the department that the student’s project falls under—the
students can choose to do research in a field outside their major. “A faculty
member in chemistry or biochemistry will have a research group that has a
program of research,” Kinsey says. “That program has niches, and the
student will be offered a niche.” Humanities research styles are quite
different, of course. “Most humanities faculty members have graduate
students,” Kinsey says, “but those students are much more independent of
the program the faculty member might have.”
In either case, the students attend the weekly RUSP classes, begin their
readings, their experiments, and their meetings with their advisers, and also
report to the faculty coordinator who has been assigned to them. Pomerantz
takes the social science students; Kinsey the chemistry, biochemistry, and
geological sciences students; and Johnson the engineering and the
humanities students. “Don’s got the hardest job,” Kinsey confides, as those
are the two broad groupings that are hardest to reconcile.
The students are generally very good about doing their work and meeting
regularly with their mentors, but Kinsey says, “I have the role of being a
nudge.” If he hasn’t gotten a progress report from a student in two weeks,
“I’ll send an e-mail.”
A few weeks before the fall semester ends, the students make their first
presentations, detailing their preliminary research, and what it is they’re
hoping to accomplish in the second semester, when they will put their
research into practice, either by conducting experiments or writing a
scholarly paper. Here’s where the challenge of communicating across
departmental boundaries begins.
Brad Lega is a senior in the philosophy
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