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Spring 2021 Letter from the Dean
Greetings and welcome to the 2021 Undergraduate Spring Symposium.
Tom Cech, past president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, once wrote that undergraduate research is the most inefficient teaching we do, and we need more of it. Cech noted this because this sort of engaged scholarship, whether research, creative activity or other scholarly work, is the most transformative for the individual. I am confident that the experience of our undergraduates whose work we appreciate here today is no less. And I can attest that my own experience as an undergraduate researcher altered the whole trajectory of my career.
To the undergraduate students who have performed the work as part of this symposium, congratulations. Congratulations for staying the course to bring your respective projects to this point. Congratulations on seizing the opportunity to do more, on challenging yourself to perform at a higher level. Congratulations also for managing your time, and yourself, at a higher level. And while it is you and your work that we celebrate, this work did not happen in a vacuum.
I want to express my sincere appreciation to the people who mentored our undergraduate scholars. This may have been another undergraduate student, a graduate student, a post-doctoral associate, a staff member or even a faculty member. Regardless of your title, thank you for taking the time to mentor these students. I hope and am trusting that the mentors found the work equally rewarding.
Scholarly work is challenging by nature. Those engaged in such work usually have a support network beyond their respective mentors that is key to their emotional and mental well-being, which is so critical in advancing their work. These support networks often include parents, grandparents, guardians, spouses, partners, advisors, siblings and other friends. To those in such networks, thank you for the important role you played in advancing the work we celebrate today.
The Office of Undergraduate Research is responsible for facilitating this symposium. The office also facilitates the Research Apprenticeship Program from which a good deal of the work in the symposium derives either directly or indirectly. I appreciate the great work of this office in advancing undergraduate research at West Virginia University.
We pursue knowledge so that we might have truth because truth sets us free. And Mountaineers are always free. Montani Semper Liberi.
Best regards,
Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry
Dean of the WVU Honors College
