The number of courses on the Berkeley campus that require a research paper or project would be impossible to count. One among hundreds of long-standing examples is Psychology 101, in which all students are required to produce a research paper. This course provides the background necessary for the students to design and carry out independent research projects or work on a faculty member’s research project in the future. In 1998-99 several departments instituted changes that improved their course-related research opportunities. For instance, the Department of Chemical Engineering changed the format of its required laboratory course. Previously, the faculty member was primarily an evaluator of the students’ final oral and written reports on the four experiments carried out during the semester. Now the faculty member serves as a consultant for the experiments while they are in progress; the new intensive hands-on approach requires the faculty member to guide the students and give them feedback at every stage of the experimental process. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese restructured its Honors Program: the honors thesis class has been expanded to two semesters, resulting in a greater number of students enrolled in the program, and producing research papers.

The Math Department has received a VIGRE (Vertical Integration of Research and Education in the Mathematical Sciences) grant, to fund a proposal that lists undergraduate research opportunities among its core components. Although the grant did not take effect until fall 1999, in spring 1999 one Math professor piloted a version of the research course that will later be sponsored under the grant. It is more difficult for undergraduates to participate in research in mathematics than in an experimental science. Professor Bernd Sturmfels structured his pilot course to make this elusive goal achievable. First, admission to the course was competitive: he had about twenty-five applicants, from among whom he chose ten. Sturmfels assigned original research papers, which the students studied under his guidance and presented to their fellow students in the seminar. Normally math students do not study original research papers until the second year of graduate school. Sturmfels accepted a handful of these students to continue working with him over the summer. Students who complete the summer research program receive a stipend of $2,500; in the pilot term the Math Department provided this stipend from gift funds; in the future the VIGRE grant will cover the stipends. The students selected for summer 1999 worked very hard and two of the three ended up obtaining new and very interesting research results. These two undergraduates, Jeff Phan and Milena Hering, have written a paper, which they are submitting to an international math conference to be held in Bath in the year 2000.

The Math Department would ultimately like to reach 20-25% of its majors with an undergraduate research opportunity in a class such as the one described above. The target group would comprise the most able and talented students, those most likely to go on to graduate school. In future years we will report on the progress made towards this goal, and any other relevant outcomes of the VIGRE grant.

The courses and opportunities described above are all designed for upper-division students. But at Berkeley sometimes even first-year students have the opportunity to do original research in their classes. This fall the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost hosted a well-attended panel presentation on the use of educational technology in freshman seminars. One of the unexpected rewards of the event was that all three of the courses highlighted at the event turned out to have engaged freshmen in original research. Professor David Auslander, in a course entitled "Animating Physics," found that current technology allowed him to teach three-dimensional computation to freshmen, whereas previously this had been mainly limited to graduate-level courses. His students created–and solved–their own harder-than-textbook problems. Another seminar covered in the panel was Professor Ronald Gronsky’s "Materials in Music." The students in his class performed original research on the materials used in making musical instruments. Gronsky and his students were unable to find an existing study of this topic, so they are considering writing a jointly authored publication detailing their results. Finally, Dr. Maria Perillo-Isaac and Professor Gibor Basri taught "Hands-On Astronomy and Physics." This seminar emphasizes research and technological skills and collaboration. The students applied the technology to fresh, actual data; there were no canned experiments in the class. The lower-division students in their seminar ended up discovering asteroids that had never been seen before. These students had a real research experience in their first year at Cal! Each of these exciting seminars was first taught in fall 1998, and each was repeated in fall 1999.

At the other end of the spectrum from Freshman Seminars is the possibility of taking a graduate-level course as an undergraduate. Two undergraduates in Computer Science participated in a team project in a graduate course they were taking, and their team ended up setting a new world record and winning a trophy at the national meeting of SIGMOD (the Special Interest Group on Management of Data) of the Association for Computing Machinery. Undergraduates Joshua Coates and Spencer Low (along with graduate student Philip Buonadonna) completed a standard benchmark sort in less than half the time of the previous record holder. Sorting is one of the most common operations done by computers. In fact, an estimated one third of all processing or CPU (central processing unit) time is spent on sorting data. Professor David Culler, head of the Millennium Project, which sponsored the team’s project, was the instructor of the course that inspired this record-breaking research project.