Students Harness the Facts for a Ride Into Research

Roman Racela stood behind the lectern looking like a boy who never wore a tie, nervous and fidgety, no longer a history student, but a historian for the first time in his life. In the audience were his fellow classmates and a serious professor in a brown suit.

Racela was presenting his research, talking about Filipino women during World War II, and how they lived under the Japanese who occupied the Philippines. He spoke of them because, he said, he wanted to give them a voice. “I had questions about this,” Racela said later. “If I’m not getting answers, I’m not satisfied with that. So I did it myself.”

In the final months of his senior year, closing in on graduation, Racela spent 100 hours or more on the Internet, in libraries and interviewing elderly Filipino women. This so he could stand among his ever-critical peers and his teachers Saturday and present his work with other students at UC Irvine, at what Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone called the “single most important event on the campus.”

More than 200 students presented projects at the UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium, vast works with titles that offer suggestions of what kinds of lives they might have as academics: “Acute Nicotine Differentially Stimulates c-fos mRNA Expression in Postnatal and Adult Rat Brains” and “Hemispheric Free Trade and Fast Track Politics: A Case Study of Chile” and the brief but slightly more whimsical “Individualism and Shoplifting.”

The symposium was held at the university student center, where students delivered presentations throughout the day in auditoriums and behind wooden lecterns. In the main hallway, over the music of a cellist and a violinist, students dressed in their Sunday best flirted and mingled and discussed their impossibly heady topics as if it were some impossibly highbrow prom.

Since 1995, the school has tried to give undergraduates more chances to get involved in research. Students in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program are teamed with professors, who serve as mentors on their projects--a relatively rare experience at a public university where teachers perennially complain about understaffing.

“The growth of undergraduate research is relatively new” at UCI and elsewhere, said James N. Danziger, dean of undergraduate studies. “This is the opposite edge of multiple-choice testing. [The students] are in charge of their research and communicate their findings and articulate their ideas.”