Research is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
When I first heard about research on campus, I felt really intimidated. Dartmouth professors are constantly making new discoveries and advances in nearly every field, and I am just an undergraduate student. However, when I learned about the high student involvement in research and its accessibility, I decided to give it a try!
Undergraduate Advising and Research (UGAR) is the platform for students to find research and receive funding.
UGAR has a running list of research projects that professors are currently working on and looking for help that are open to students. In my case, I saw that Professor Lindsay Whaley was doing research on Early Christian metaphors within the Classics department through the database and sent him an email asking if I could join his team.
In most cases, professors welcome student help, and Professor Whaley was no exception. He told me his research plan, how I could help, and I then drafted a research funding proposal for UGAR with a brief summary of what I would be doing for his research.
After a couple of weeks, I received an email from UGAR that notified me of my approved research funding request. Dartmouth funds most part-time research assistants for roughly 100 hours in a term (about 10 hours a week).
While my research has yet to begin, I am so grateful that Dartmouth allows research with world-renowned professors to be so accessible. While other institutions rely on graduate students for research, Dartmouth is a college, which means faculty go to undergraduate students with their research interests.