AURCA Mentors
Thank you for your interest in mentoring AURCA students! AURCA was established by the College of Arts and Sciences to expand access to valuable research and creative opportunities to work-study eligible undergraduates.
Program Overview
The AURCA program is excited to support the fourth cohort of student researchers during the 2024-2025 academic year. Access to paid work is often a barrier to research experiences for students, particularly those who are economically at-risk and/or from populations historically under-supported in research. The AURCA program connects eligible undergraduates to paid research and creative opportunities with CAS faculty mentors. AURCA mentors receive enthusiastic mentees who expand research progress and cultivate new knowledge.
AURCA at-a-glance
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All CAS faculty may apply to be an AURCA research mentor.
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There is no financial cost to AURCA research mentors. AURCA research students are 100% supported by AURCA funds and the students' financial aid.
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AURCA mentors interview and select a student among the AURCA applicant pool.
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AURCA students work 8-14 hours per week during the academic year (fall and spring).
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Undergraduates with federal work-study funding through their financial aid package may apply for AURCA.
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AURCA mentors have the primary responsibility of training and supervising the undergraduate research student, although graduate students and research assistants may assist on a day-to-day basis.
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AURCA offers resources and facilitates training for mentors who would like enhance their mentoring relationship with AURCA research assistants.
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For those who are interested, AURCA recommends mentoring resources from the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research.
Mentor Requirements
- Hiring and orienting an AURCA student
Hire students who are excited about the project topic!
Student investment in the project increases when you share project goals, big-picture significance, and the role their small part plays in the overall project.
Provide background readings to help the student understand the context of the project. Introduce the student to others working on the project and their roles, specify what training the student will need and who will be supervising them, etc. Contact AURCA for help facilitating necessary training.
- Expectations and schedules
Agree upon a work schedule, offering a minimum of 8 hours per week.
Establish schedule policies, including when and where the student should be when working, what they should do if they cannot be there or realize they have a conflict. How much advance notice do you expect? Whom should they contact and through what means (email, a phone call, etc.)?
Establish clear expectations for the project early, including what tasks students will undertake and why. Explain what it will take for students to earn increasing responsibility as they progress.
- Communication and engagement
Set up regular meeting times with your student to touch base, review progress and performance, answer questions.
Strive to create an environment where asking questions is encouraged. Be clear about your policies regarding question asking (e.g. would you rather have the student ask many questions, some more than once, to limit mistakes or an alternative approach).
What kind of note-taking is expected? What is the best way to communicate with you? Good communication is the key to a successful partnership.
Spend time occasionally chatting with the student about their classes, campus life, etc. It is invaluable to the student and increases their sense of belonging in the research environment and at OSU.
- Mistakes and feedback
If the student is doing something wrong, give them constructive feedback right away. Often they can make the correction if given a clear explanation of the problem and what needs to be done differently.
Remember that AURCA students are often new to research and creative activity. Regular, supportive feedback is critical to their success in the program and future experiences.
Contact AURCA right away if there is a problem. We want to help you resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Submit a Project
- Mentor application and requirements
Mentor applications for the upcoming academic year typically open in late spring semester. Applications for 2024-2025 are due June 14, 2024.
The short, online application asks you to provide a brief description of the project, student tasks and duties, hours per week expected, minimum qualifications required and your contact information for interviews. You will start interviewing AURCA applicants in mid/late August.
- Designing an AURCA project
The AURCA program encourages student applicants who may be new to research and creative activity. Please keep this in mind when designing a project. AURCA projects should have enough work to occupy students 8-12 hours of work per week during the academic year (September - early May), even before any trainings are fully completed.
AURCA projects do not need to be fully independent, but may function as part of a larger project, a pilot study or preliminary data gathering. Be specific in your project description, tasks, and minimum qualifications. This will help interested students find the best project fit.
AURCA projects should be feasible for the student and should generate some data/information the student could present. AURCA projects can be multi-faceted and have built-in challenges that students can overcome after developing their skills and confidence.
Note, students will receive the list of project descriptions without the mentor information at first. Students will be prepped for the interview phase with you through an AURCA orientation session and will receive contact information for potential mentors after orientation. At this point, students will begin contacting you for interviews. Please exclude names or specific identifiers from the project description.
AURCA aims to offer some professional development workshops and other trainings. We will also facilitate finding available trainings for your students, when possible. If there are specific trainings desired for students on your project, list them in the specified section on the application.
- Application components
Project title
Project description (~100 - 200 words)
Tasks and responsibilities
Minimum qualifications of the student
Skills or knowledge the student will gain through the project
Required or recommended training (AURCA may be able to facilitate some trainings)
Hours per week the student will work and any schedule constraints
- Submit a project
Interested faculty may submit a project application at the below link. Current/former AURCA mentors are eligible to apply for a new or continuing project. We will review the full project application pool when considering the extent of new and continuing projects to select for the upcoming year.
Sample Projects
The AURCA program is committed to supporting curious students from all disciplines and backgrounds. We aim to offer a variety of projects from across CAS disciplines. AURCA students will receive access to the project list after a mandatory orientation session in late August. We encourage students to explore broadly and be open to all projects that spark their curiosity. Students often place strong emphasis on the skills to be gained and the work environment when selecting projects. Below are broad topic areas of some recent AURCA projects, though many projects could be considered interdisciplinary. Within these areas, we share some sample project descriptions and student responsibilities.
- Arts and Humanities
Digital Publishing in Art History
We seek a student research assistant to aid with the publication of an open access online scholarly journal that is supported by OSU and another university. The journal, called Different Visions, is focused on art history and medieval studies: https://differentvisions.org/ The student will contribute to the preparation of each issue. The full process can take a year or two from the concept for an issue to the formatting the final essays. During the 22-23 academic year we expect at least two issues to be published, possibly three, as well as preparations for future issues. A research symposium presentation could explain the processes and technical knowledge needed for publishing such a journal as well as the issues surrounding open-access scholarship.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
The primary duties of the student will be to aid in the transition of finalized scholarly essays and accompanying images onto the online platform (using wordpress) and format them as downloadable pdfs. Student will also contribute to the promotion of essays on social media and through other paths. Additional duties may develop, related to the design and organization of the website as well as planning for future issues. Student will also research back issues and brainstorm new ways to promote and share the journal’s research.
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Research on dialects of English in Oklahoma (RODEO)
The Language Studies Lab in the Department of English houses a collection of dialect data from all over Oklahoma. The collection includes data across an urban-rural gradient, inter-generational data, and limited data from minority groups in the state. We are in the process of organizing, transcribing, and storing the data in improved ways to support more types of research. We are also looking to increase our collection, especially for minority groups, which although present in our collection, are under-represented. The student researcher would continue to support making our current collection more accessible as well as help us grow our collection. Part of the new data collection can be tailored toward a specific question of the student’s guided choosing.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
The student will make the data collection more user-friendly. They will continue to cut audio using open source software such as Audacity and Praat. They will create transcriptions using open source software such as eLan and other automated systems. They will code data for specific words using data coding software, such as NVivo. They will work on protecting participant information while allowing more student researchers to work with this data.
The student will also collect new data with a new data collection instrument, integrate this new data into the collection, and work on their own research question on the data. This may involve further transcription, vowel measurements, and transcription.
The student will have opportunities to present the data and their work with the data to public audiences. The lab plans to do a presentation for the Center of Oklahoma Studies in September. We hope the student will present work on the new data they helped collect at the undergraduate research symposium.
- Geosciences and Environmental Studies
Oklahoma's Changing Hydroclimate
Compared to the more humid East, the Western half of the country is an area defined by, and often limited by, its availability of water. Oklahoma finds itself precariously positioned at this divide, and as climate continues to warm, research suggests that the dryer conditions more often associated with the West will shift eastward. How changing climate and precipitation regimes will impact water resources for the state are not yet fully understood and require further research. Questions of interest are: How have precipitation patterns (and amounts) changed in recent years? How will changing water regimes impact stream flow and local water bodies, or have they changed already? As temperatures increase, so do rates of evaporation and crop water demand. What will changing precipitation regimes mean for local water availability in a state with a large amount of agriculture? Through an analysis of the current literature and investigations of locally available weather data, many of these questions can be explored and lend insight to Oklahoma’s changing hydroclimate.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
These will vary over the term and based on student interest and skillset, but some examples of tasks: Reading and accessing scientific literature, literature review (writing about the literature in a condensed format), downloading and working with environmental data (ie, weather or streamflow data) in multiple formats (csv or netcdf, most likely), simple statistical analysis and data visualizations either in excel or a programming language.
- Life Sciences
Infectious diseases in Caribbean lizards
This project will focus on evaluating the prevalence of malaria and other endogenous parasites in lizards. Very little is known about the presence of malaria in Caribbean lizard populations, and new species of malaria have recently been discovered and named. Malaria in other species is known to cause population decreases, crashes, and extirpations. We have previously collected blood samples from ~600 individual Anolis lizards, and will now stain them and use a microscope to identify the presence of malaria. We have also previously generated sequence data which we will use bioinformatics techniques to mine for evidence of common malarial parasites. We expect that this will provide an in-depth comparison of microscope based and genetic based methods for detecting malaria, and will provide some baseline data for the geographic extent of and prevalence of parasite infection.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
The student will have the opportunity to be mentored and embedded into a research experience that will provide a solid entry into the mechanics of conducting research, generating data, maintaining lab records, and analyzing data. They will be provided the opportunity to be a co-author on resulting publications. I anticipate that the student will be able to present some aspects of this work at scientific symposia or conferences.
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Controlling Pests via sensory Inhibition: Expression, Purification, and characterization of Pheromone-binding Protein
The ability to respond to chemical stimuli is a fundamental behavior of all organisms. Lepidoptera male moths have an exquisitely sensitive olfactory system that is capable of perceiving airborne pheromone molecules released by females and responding to them over great distances. Pheromone binding proteins (PBPs) located in the antennae of male moths play an important role in olfaction. They are carrier proteins that pick up volatile hydrophobic pheromone molecules at high pH and transport them across the aqueous sensillar lymph releasing at low pH near the membrane-bound olfactory neuron. Unraveling the mysteries of pheromone binding and release controlled by changes in pH is critical not only to our understanding of insect olfaction but also for any future investment on control of the olfactory behavior of deleterious insects that are voracious agricultural pests of many important crops through pheromone based integrated pest management.
The mechanism of pheromone binding and release by pheromone-binding protein of an invasive pest, Asian corn borer will be investigated. The investigation will include expression of the protein, purification through chromatographic techniques, and characterization of the pure protein using various biochemical and biophysical techniques.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
Student will work either with the mentor or her research group member (grad student) learning various techniques used in our laboratory for biochemistry work. Once the student is familiar with these, they will carry out these research under our guidance. The research will involve preparing media, and buffers, expression of proteins, and their purification using dialysis, anion exchange, and size exclusion chromatography respectively. Pure proteins will be analyzed by fluorescence, and other techniques.
- Computational and Physical Sciences
Computational modeling of social media networks
The existence of social media forums help people to receive updates almost immediately either from direct news sources (news media) or from indirect sources (online friends/social networks). Around 68% of U.S. adults use social media to get daily updates on news and most of them find the news to be misleading or inaccurate. Such misinformation can be identified with several factors like how they propagate in the social network?, what content is being shared in which community?, who is responding to the shared content in social media?, and how they are responding to the shared content?. In this research project we will focus on the latter on how the information is being perceived over the course of its propagation in the social network. The primary goal of this project is to capture characteristics of conversations using computational and statistical models based on the user text and dynamics of user preferences and arguments on social media.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
Students involved in this project will require basic Python programming skills along with motivation to get involved into Data Science research. The student worker will be working with problems like social media analysis, network mining, and machine learning. The student worker will also be collecting data from social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit. This research project will refine the knowledge of student worker in data science and increase Python programming skills for data analytics. All these skills would be extremely useful for the student worker if they wants to do summer internships in data science or even apply for graduate school.
- Behavioral and Social Sciences
Identity and power status in global terror organizations
One of the great puzzles in terrorism research is what role does communal identity and power status play out in terrorist organization targeting decisions. Is ethnicity a “weapon of the weak” that allows discriminated ethnic groups to strike back against more politically powerful ethnic groups? Or is terrorism used in an enforcement role; meant to keep politically disadvantaged ethnicities subservient to more powerful groups? As part of an effort to solve this puzzle, I have been mentoring a team of undergraduate student researchers who are collecting data on terrorist organizations listed in the Global Terrorism Database. Students research and code whether each organization claims to represent, recruits from, or receives financial support from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group. They also catalog the “power status” of this group, using the coding from a separate cross-national dataset known as the Ethnic Power Relations dataset. While this team has so far completed coding for groups operating in Europe and North America, data on Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia has yet to be collected. An AURCA student would join the team in finishing this data collection effort.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
The student will work as part of a research team collecting data on terrorist organizations listed in the Global Terrorism Database. Using search engines to find reliable information on each terrorist group from academic, government, or other trustworthy sources, the student will research and code whether each organization claims to represent, recruits from, or receives financial support from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group. Initial research will focus on African countries, with students selecting other countries in other regions if time permits. Students will input this data into a shared Google spreadsheet document. They will also use this dataset to catalog their information sources. The student will also have the opportunity to learn basic data cleaning and analysis skills in STATA statistical software package.
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OKState Newlywed Project
The OKState Newlywed Project is a longitudinal study examining affective, neuroendocrine, behavioral, and social-cognitive processes that impact marital satisfaction trajectories and stability. We are recruiting newlywed couples from Stillwater and the surrounding communities extending out to Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Couples will complete an intake baseline survey, attend an in-person laboratory session, complete daily diary surveys, and then complete follow-up surveys every four months for the first couple years of marriage. This project utilizes a multi-method approach, including self-report, behavioral, physiological, and implicit social-cognitive methods, with the aim of advancing theory on long-term romantic relationship maintenance. Thus, this project will provide hands-on experience and mentoring with a variety of Psychological research methods.
Student tasks and responsibilities:
This is a Project Manager position; thus, the AURCA student will help oversee all aspects of this project. For recruitment, responsibilities will include flyer distribution and social media advertisement. For intake, responsibilities will include making phone calls to prospective participants, scheduling couples for their in-person laboratory session, and sending couples their baseline survey. For participant management, responsibilities will include sending reminders to participants to complete surveys, running in-person laboratory sessions (often during evenings and on weekends), scheduling follow-up surveys, and filing requests for participant payments.