Rising Communication sophomore Alice Chilton’s summer plans include a trip to England. But instead of a typical vacation, she will be poring over play scripts, production photos, stage management notes and publicity materials in several archives.
After weeks of proposal planning, drafting and editing, Chilton became one of 301 Northwestern students awarded a Summer Undergraduate Research Grant. For her project, Chilton plans to write a research paper about the history of the Red Ladder Theatre Company, which has its roots in Britain’s radical socialist theater movement.
Chilton said she wanted to find a way to “occupy (her) summer” and “be (her) own boss” and had been considering summer research since first talking to Office of Undergraduate Research Director Peter Civetta at the fall organizations fair. She added that she was particularly interested in doing an archival research project abroad.
Civetta, who has overseen undergraduate research since 2007, said the program has evolved considerably. Initially, it would have been rare for a student like Chilton, a rising sophomore interested in arts and humanities, to participate.
He said undergraduate research originally consisted largely of juniors looking to do a senior thesis and skewed heavily toward STEM disciplines. He wanted to change that, encouraging students to get started in research earlier in their undergraduate years and push for research across every discipline.
“Part of what we were seeking to do was to create an infrastructure that supported the non-lab students,” Civetta said.
For this summer, Civetta said the program received a record 531 applications, and over half of applicants were awarded the $4,000 grant. He added that the program has no cap on how many grants it can award. He said this summer’s grants are evenly distributed between first-years, sophomores and juniors, and although there are still more STEM research projects like previous years, the program has seen an increase in arts and humanities research applications.
Chilton said she planned to use the grant money to travel to England and spend five days in London’s Bishopsgate Institute before traveling north to the Red Ladder Theatre Company’s headquarters and the University of Leeds’ archival collection on the theater company.
She said the bulk of her research will be completed abroad, and the travel is the aspect of her project she is most excited for.
“I’ve never traveled alone,” Chilton said. “I’m really excited to navigate a couple new cities alone and travel around, meet people.”
For rising Weinberg sophomore Caitlyn Powell, SURG money will be used to live in Chicago for a month. Powell’s research is following up a study conducted by the NU Social Environment and Health Lab, where she works. She said living in Chicago will give her a new perspective on what life as a full-time researcher would look like.
She said she reached out to her lab manager after learning about SURG, seeking to find a project she could work on over the summer. To help the lab’s research, Powell’s summer will involve reading through background literature to help define and quantify what foods are considered “ultraprocessed,” examining preexisting data from the lab and finding a way to code it.
She said it was important for her to become involved with research as an undergraduate because she is considering medical school and wants to take advantage of the University’s opportunities.
“Especially as an undergrad at a school with so many research opportunities and opportunities in general, I definitely just wanted to expand my STEM background as much as possible,” Powell said.
Civetta said SURG is a valuable program for all students, even if they aren’t considering graduate school. He said research provides important life skills that students don’t typically get from classes.
As an undergraduate, students are frequently taught to provide solutions to problems that already have answers “because that’s called a midterm,” he said.
But after graduating, Civetta said these skills are less useful.
“Research is less about answers,” he said. “It’s about asking questions. What is the right question? What is the means of answering that, and then how do we grapple with that?”
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