To learn more about the SEISMIC Scholars Program, I spoke with Vanessa Woods, who has been a member of the organizing team since the beginning. Woods is an Associate Teaching Professor within the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has always had an interest in undergraduate research, which is proven to help students engage in deep learning and increase engagement and retention. Participating in undergraduate research experiences can also be a tool for transformation for students from underrepresented backgrounds, allowing them to feel like they belong in STEM. “They’re very interested and very passionate, but they don’t necessarily feel they have a ton of the skills they need… I don’t actually see it that way.”

Undergraduate research experiences open many doors for undergraduate students, such as graduate school and career opportunities. However, these experiences are often inaccessible for students who must work to support themselves, as research internships are often unpaid, or don’t pay very much. Woods had noticed that various programs at UC Santa Barbara had tried to address this in the past, but often failed to offer an adequate stipend. With other members of the organizing team, Woods began envisioning a program where SEISMIC Scholars could be paid for 10 hours of remote work a week, compensating students for their efforts and allowing them to hold other jobs if needed. While many SEISMIC efforts focus on course-level or department-level changes, the SEISMIC Scholars Program provided a way for members of SEISMIC to make an impact at the individual student-level.

The organizing team decided early on that this undergraduate research experience would be virtual to allow for students from all SEISMIC institutions to participate. Woods notes that when designing virtual experiences, one must be intentional about setting up programming and engagement. Woods and the organizing team knew that they wanted the SEISMIC Scholars Program to focus on three aspects: mentorship, research, and professional development. While it was a lot of work during the first year – from planning meetings to building a curriculum to designing assessments – the organizing team took it in stride.

Finding mentors for the Scholars was always easy, Woods recalls. “Our SEISMIC network has very cool, generous, wicked smart researchers.” And these researchers were able to embrace their own mentoring styles, meeting with their mentees at least once a week, sometimes in group calls, sometimes individually. Because of these Scholar mentors, students were able to participate in a variety of projects within SEISMIC. Depending on the Scholar’s assigned project and mentor, students learned about research methods such as qualitative coding, working with RStudio, literature review, and grant writing. Woods would always team up with Maggie Safronova, another member of the organizing team from the University of California Santa Barbara, and the two would train Scholars to investigate written survey responses, searching for tones and messages to code.

I also spoke to Karen Lin, an undergraduate student at the University of California Davis who was a SEISMIC Scholar in the 2023 Program. Lin is majoring in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and is set to graduate in a few months. Lin told me that she heard about the SEISMIC Scholars Program from one of her professors, who was encouraging students to apply for the opportunity. Lin, who also works as a tutor, learned that SEISMIC emphasizes making STEM more accessible. This resonated with her, and she was eager to learn about being a better teacher, especially for underrepresented students. Lin’s mentor was Nita Tarchinski, SEISMIC’s Project Manager. Tarchinski taught both Lin and fellow SEISMIC Scholar Glory Figueroa about the grant writing process, including literature review and drafting content. Lin says that this has been incredibly helpful for her, as many of the labs she is exploring are interested in these skills. “It isn’t really emphasized within the usual college curriculum,” Lin adds. Together, Lin and Figueroa worked with Tarchinski to prepare for a grant proposal focused on improving student success for transfer students.

Woods says that the organizing team thought a lot about what the professional development portion of the program should look like. The team wanted to be conscious of the needs of marginalized groups of students, such as first-generation students or students from low-income families – groups of students that the Scholars program was designed to support. This led to many planned topics of discussion: aspects of hidden curriculum (a term used to describe the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons students learn in education), jargon used in higher education, how to read research articles, and how to create a CV. Mentors and scholars met once a week to tackle this content. “We felt it was really important to help them think about their skills and strengths,” Woods says. Additionally, the organizing team has found multiple speakers over the years who were encouraging and open to talking with students.

The SEISMIC Scholars Program experience concludes with a Poster Showcase, where students present the research they’ve done during the summer. “That’s my favorite part of all of it,” Woods says. As the MC of the virtual poster session, she has each student pick their “walk-up song”, playing it for the audience to hear as students set up their screens for sharing. Students are encouraged to invite friends and family so they can show off their hard work. “It was a good way to learn how to synthesize and organize the information that we’ve been researching,” Lin says. She also notes that the presentation gave her an additional accomplishment for her CV.

 Woods is proud of the work both the organizing teams and Scholars have accomplished each year of the program. Looking toward SEISMIC 2.0, she hopes the SEISMIC Scholars Program is something that can continue. She also dreams of a version of the program that can have a bigger in-person component. The 2023 Scholars were able to meet at that year’s SEISMIC Annual Meeting, and Woods saw how impactful it was to their overall experience. “I think it’s like the icing on the cake,” Woods says. When Lin thinks about a future iteration of the Scholars program, she says she hopes the program can be longer. “We have the space to ask questions from professionals who have been doing this work, so having the chance to do a deeper dive would have been nice.” Even without an increased length or additional in-person component, the SEISMIC Scholars Program has provided 34 undergraduate students with summer research experiences focused on building research skills, offering mentorship, and providing networking opportunities.