What Undergraduate Research Really Means

When I was a prospective student visiting William and Mary, I remember my tour guide telling us all about undergraduate research opportunities for the students. Although she sounded really excited about working with professors and other students on these projects, it didn’t have much appeal to me at the time. In my mind, undergrad research was unimportant to the collegiate experience – after all, with so many other fun opportunities available at William and Mary, why would I want to spend my free time doing more research? And so I decided to attend without any thought to the prospect that I might someday end up working on one of these research projects.

As soon as I began classes, however, my mindset about undergrad research changed completely. Sitting in class listening to professors, I began to realize just how fascinating the work they were doing was. I heard about travels to other countries to gather data, professors doing interviews with some of the most powerful politicians in the country, and how the information they were gathering was not only interesting, but was fundamentally changing the way we viewed our disciplines. Most importantly, they were as passionate about the work they were doing as they were about teaching our class. After hearing all of this, suddenly the idea of doing undergrad research was a lot more appealing.

I finally decided to seek a research position at the end of my first semester, after we did our final project in my freshman seminar titled “American Political Institutions”. For our final project, Prof. Larry Evans (who I would later end up working for) gave us actual data from his major research project, the Congressional Whip Count Project, and taught us how to do all of the data entry and analysis on our own. We got to see the actual documents that Congressional leaders used to help sway votes in the House and Senate, and learned how to use all the programs and tools that he was using for his work. He helped walk us through the process of analyzing, manipulating, and presenting our own data – our own little research project – and got us to see that research wasn’t just pouring over books in the library all day. Research could actually be fun!

At the end of that semester, I went to Prof. Evans and asked him if there were any opportunities for me to get involved more deeply in the research he was doing, and he immediately offered me a position as a research assistant for the summer. Best part: I was paid! Not only was I getting to do some really interesting work during the summer, but now I had a job as well! It was a pretty good deal, and during the summer after my freshman year, I worked with Prof. Evans on the Congressional Whip Count Project, as well as an article that was later published in an anthology.

But it kept getting better. During the summer, Prof. Evans asked me to coauthor a paper with him for the Western Political Science Association conference in San Francisco later that year, an offer which I gladly accepted. During the semester, Prof. Evans and I worked on the paper, and just this month, we flew to San Francisco to present at the conference. When I got there, I was surprised to find that I was one of the only undergraduates at the conference – everyone else was a professor or a grad student. That’s when I realized that when we say undergrad research is unique to William and Mary, we really mean it. I was also the only undergraduate on our panel to actually present our paper to the audience, an experience which I will never forget.

Although my work with Prof. Evans is finished for now, it’s spurred me to take on some research projects of my own. Next semester, I will be doing an internship at the National Assembly for Wales, and while I am there, I will be doing an independent research project comparing the Assembly with our own Congress. I hope to turn this project into an honors thesis for my senior year. I’m really excited about this project, but it would never have happened if it hadn’t been for the amazing professors like Prof. Evans, who are gracious enough to let students not just take part in their research projects, but actually have ownership over them as well. Although I may not have realized it when I got here on my first day, I now know how amazing it is that we can call ourselves the best liberal arts research university in the nation.

– Nicky Bell ‘12