Interview with Carolyn Ash - Caltech Oral Histories

Ash–21
expect a SURF project to have the potential for publication in a refereed journal. At MIT,
students could come in and do anything. But the advantage at MIT is that students come in and
see themselves as researchers, and the principle of labeling takes effect. And very often—very
often—they go on and do some very interesting things. They call it “research” when they come
in at the lowest entry level.
COHEN: It’s a matter of semantics, really.
ASH: It is. At Caltech, SURF students who do those introductory things would probably do
them by some other means—maybe they’d be hired into a laboratory, or they’d get that
experience by other means. We would not call it “undergraduate research.”
So anyway, the conferences have gone on every year since 1987, and Caltech hosted the
national conference in 1991.
COHEN: Who sponsors these conferences? Or who was the prime mover? How did it happen?
ASH: Well, it was started by the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and then a group of
people came together around the conference with a commitment to ensuring that the conferences
would go forward. They’ve done some fund-raising over time; and most recently—probably
four or five years ago—they actually have a donor that provides grants for interdisciplinary
research to institutions. So it has become much more formalized over time. Caltech hosted
NCUR in 1991, as part of our centennial celebration, and we brought 1,100 students from all
over the country here to Caltech.
COHEN: That must have been a huge effort.
ASH: It was a huge effort.
COHEN: Did you accommodate that with your own staff, or did you bring people in to help you?
ASH: I hired Linda McManus, who had most recently worked in development doing event
planning and so on. She had never done an event of this magnitude, but we said, “Oh, you just
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