At the heart of the Brown education is the student-faculty relationship. And perhaps some of the best illustrations of this relationship can be found in the University's UTRA/Odyssey program, initiated in 1986 as a way to encourage undergraduates to consider academic careers.
The program, in which more than 70 percent of the faculty participates, provides an opportunity to work closely in a research situation with a faculty member, to participate in course development and revision, and to experience the work of college teaching directly, according to Dean Karen Romer, who supervises the program.
The collaborative undertaking is typically accomplished with an UTRA - Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship - which may be held either over the summer or during a semester. When these projects lead to the inclusion of new or more extensive material on racial and ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups in America, the projects are called Odyssey Fellowships.
GSJ writers Linda J.P. Mahdesian and Tracie Sweeney set out to find what the UTRA experience meant to its participants. Here is what they found.
Treasures in sand and sweat
By Linda J. P. Mahdesian
In the oven called Petra, an ancient Jordanian land near the grave of Aaron, the brother of Moses, Joshua Bell '96 found his calling. "It's like a dream slowly unraveling - you don't know where it'll take you," he says. That dream included sweating in 110-degree heat while doing painstaking archeological work last summer. "The air is so dry, your sweat just evaporates," says Bell. He was part of a team of 25 college students and faculty led by Martha Joukowsky, professor of Old World art and archeology, excavating the Southern Temple of Petra.
Surrounded by multi-colored sandstone cliffs, the diggers excavated tombs carved into rock. They dug large trenches nearly 20 feet deep, with dirt stairways going down. They found lamps, pieces of pottery, coins from the Byzantine period, and pieces of giant elephant heads originally used to decorate the tops of the temple pillars. Then team members had to make wall drawings, required by Joukowsky - exact scale mappings on paper of each layer of sediment and what was found in it.
The most unexpected thing the team found was a Brown alumnus on the top of a hill shouting at them after spotting the University flag at the dig site. "He kept saying `I'm the Class of '60!' " says Bell.
This was Bell's third UTRA experience. During his first two he sweated it out with Geoffrey McCafferty, assistant professor of anthropology, in Cholula, Mexico. About a three-hour drive southeast of Mexico City, Cholula holds many Mesoamerican artifacts.
Bell is sold on UTRAs. "Doing an UTRA refocuses me when I come back," he says. "They're more challenging to me than the classroom."
Growing up, Bell was always fascinated with the past and ancient societies, especially the Mayans. He devoured National Geographic and loved to go to museums with his parents. "I remember seeing these beautiful objects and wondering what kind of people used them and what their lives were like," he says.
Bell viewed this third UTRA as a test, in a way, to see if his intellectual curiosity lay solely in the region of Mexico and whether or not the discipline of archaeology is his academic destiny. The result? "I love archaeology, I just don't want to be a professor of archaeology," he says. Bell plans to pursue a doctorate in the history of art and architecture, anthropology or religious studies. He will attend Oxford University in the fall as the next step toward his Ph.D.
Bell's UTRA experience with Joukowsky fueled his interest in how religious ideas are symbolized in a society's art and architecture, and how that material culture affects how individuals interact with and see their world. "It opened my eyes about where I could work in an academic setting. ...Martha's very demanding. But she teaches you an incredible amount. I can competently dig."
Bell will continue his sandy search for the past this summer working in Tunisia, near the Sahara Desert. He'll be excavating a fifth-century B.C. Christian cemetery complex. He found out about it on the Internet. The project leader is Susan Stevenson, a professor at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Va.
Bell sent his résumé to Stevenson and got a recommendation letter from Joukowsky, who raved about Bell's work, except for one thing: "She put all these great things about me in the letter, then added `but he takes forever to do his wall drawings,' " says Bell laughing. "Martha's right."
A Lincoln runs through it
By Linda J. P. Mahdesian
Picture a dusty summer road in upstate New York, a greasy-spoon diner, rusted trucks with muddy tires parked out front. A sleek, new, maroon 1995 Lincoln Town Car drives up fast. As the dust settles, three men get out of the leathered, air-conditioned interior. One is a fast-talking, fast-walking, sunburned middle-aged man with map in hand; the other two are college-age guys in shorts and T-shirts, cameras around their necks. You think they could be his sons, except one of them is African American.
Welcome to the whirlwind UTRA road trip with Patrick Malone, assistant professor of American civilization, and his research assistants Eric Evans '98 and Abraham Sheppard '97. "I probably endangered their health," says Malone. "We usually ordered ham and egg sandwiches with home fries."
Their mission: to gather field research and photographs to redesign Malone's course, "Society and Culture in America: Rivers in American Life." The course focuses on the cultural use and meaning of rivers and the effects urban structures along rivers have on the local communities and environment.
Malone and company wanted to see how rivers were altered by human development such as dams, canals, industrial enterprises and pollution. This interest in rivers flows from Malone's latest book-in-progress, "Cities at the Falls," a study of the topography, technology and urban development of cities established at waterfalls.
Covering 1,700 miles in seven days - from New England to Ontario - the scholars on wheels took reams of notes, rolls of photographs - and stopped at a lot of roadside diners along the way - all for academics. Malone, who has a joint appointment in urban studies, also gathered photos and facts for his course on automobiles.
Evans and Malone click when it comes to cars, because Evans sold Toyotas for seven years in the suburb of Mamroneck, N.Y. This 29-year-old Resumed Undergraduate Education student decided he didn't want "to be 45 and selling cars six days a week," so he turned to academia instead. He hopes to blend his interests in urban studies and political science into a career in urban politics.
Malone "would dictate notes to us while he drove," says Evans, who would sit in the passenger seat and type on the laptop computer in his lap. He adds, "Our personalities worked very well - he's very go-go; I'm laid back." Evans, who has studied photography, took many of the pictures which will be used in Malone's classes and books. He and Sheppard took turns navigating and deciphering the maps. Evans confesses to getting lost on their way to Love Canal: "The streets on the map didn't exist anymore."
They eventually made it to Love Canal, right outside of Niagara Falls in New York state. This nearly deserted community is the site of one of the most infamous toxic waste dumps in recent history. Hundreds of families living in the community that was built around the canal left in the 1970s when the hazards were disclosed. "Others came back," says Malone. "Some refused to move. It's still questionable how safe it is to live there."
Part of last summer's UTRA project was closer to home, researching the Woonasquatucket River in Rhode Island. The river begins north and west of Providence and runs through what is now Water Place in downtown Providence. Sheppard assists Malone with another course in urban studies that focuses on field work in urban archeology and historic preservation. "Abe has helped other students learn how to do archival and field research - he complements what I do in lectures and office hours," says Malone.
This was Evans' first UTRA experience, but it probably won't be his last. "It really energizes your interest in academics," he says, "and it shows you what an academic goes through to prepare a course."
"Part of the purpose of the UTRA is to introduce students to academic life and what we do as scholars," says Malone. "It was fun to show them what I do," he adds. "Eric and Abe had the same insatiable curiosity as I had. ... That's what scholarship is all about. They were delightful company."
When everything gels
By Linda J.P. Mahdesian
When Wincha Chong '96 talks about gels and combs, she's not talking about doing her hair. She's talking about complicated tests involving DNA molecules and in this case, fetal liver cells.
One gel test can take six hours to complete. One mistake can ruin an entire day's work. That made for some frustrating days last summer during Chong's UTRA project with Ken Zaret, professor in the department of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry.
"There was a two-week period in the beginning of the summer when I couldn't even figure out something as simple as how to keep the gel itself from sliding out between the glass plates," wrote Chong in her UTRA evaluation.
Zaret understands the emotional side of scientific research. "Science is a very frustrating business. If you're trying to push the bounds of scientific research - you're going to be frustrated most of the time. What I try to teach my students is to get emotional satisfaction from the work even if they don't experience success. That's very important."
Chong's test involves constructing a sandwich of gel pressed between two glass plates. The sandwich is then turned vertically and set on a trough. At the top, a specialized "comb" is inserted into the gel to make tiny wells in which solutions containing different packages of DNA and other proteins are poured. Each bundle then sinks through the gel at varying speeds and a photo is taken, revealing a series of black dots. Each dot corresponds to one of the bundles.
What the test shows is how the DNA is telling different proteins to turn on or off - those proteins regulate the growth of the liver cells. Determining how DNA controls cell growth could one day help scientists understand how to repair damaged or diseased livers. It could also explain how cancer cells can be stopped from growing and how HIV viruses can be halted before they continue their rampage on the road to AIDS.
Unfortunately, the existing gel test protocols that worked in other labs for other proteins didn't work for the protein Zaret and his team were using, so they were stumped. But Chong persevered. Like an expert chef, she experimented with different ingredients and portions. She used different combs, different binding conditions for the DNA. She consulted with existing literature and with other labs.
Then one morning in August, near the end of her summer internship, she was developing the film from the gel test run the previous day. Even in the red dim of the small developing room, she could clearly see on the film the shifting bands of dots showing the various reactions. "I was ecstatic! It was exactly what I had wanted to see on the films of the 20 or so unsuccessful gels I had run earlier in the summer," she says.
Zaret was impressed. "What Wincha did was set up a protocol for a biochemical model for gene activation in early liver development ... I've seen plenty of students who haven't seen the positive results Wincha has seen."
Zaret's approach to UTRA students is to put them in a lab with postdoctoral students and highly challenging projects and see what they come up with. "Because I don't have expectations of particular results when I hire UTRA students, very often I will put them on one of the most daring projects in the lab," he says. "I can take some ideas with the greatest leap - either conceptually or technologically - and see if I can get one of these undergraduates to make any headway."
Chong made headway. In fact, Zaret is using the protocol she developed to test another regulatory protein in liver development. "Wincha's work helped lay the foundation for postdoctoral researchers to perform their experiments," he says. For Chong, her work with Zaret formed the basis of her senior thesis, and for her long-term goal of becoming a physician.
Getting with the program
By Tracie Sweeney
Last summer, Zachary Roadhouse '98 became an expert in hurdles - not the kind you'd find in track and field competitions, but those found in the engineering laboratory of Professor Benjamin Kimia.
In the course of his UTRA work on shape recognition, Roadhouse had to learn how to use the LEMS (Laboratory for Engineering of Man-Machine Systems), complex Sun workstations, and a programming language called C++. By mastering these tools, Roadhouse was able to create a program that displayed demonstration models for research being done by Kimia and a team of graduate students on how to reduce a shape - a binary image - into a form in which a computer can compare two such shapes and make a match.
Working with Kimia and a graduate student, Roadhouse created the program, called a "shoxel display," to reveal the shapes developed by manipulating an algorithm.
In addition, Roadhouse refined a computer project that splits a binary image into its parts, for instance, separating the fuselage of an airplane from its wing and tail. "This was the part I liked least of my summer sortie," Roadhouse said. "It was a headache working with several thousand lines of instructions" that were poorly written.
The high point of the summer was a presentation prepared for the head of the National Science Foundation's artificial intelligence department. "I put in many hours that week, but it was worth it," Roadhouse says. "Several days later Kimia congratulated me after he received a letter from our visitor [who] said that our lab was one of the best he had seen in a while. I was pretty excited to be a part of it as a rising sophomore!"
Kimia was equally excited by the research Roadhouse did through UTRA. "His programming expertise has helped our group and will help him in his future career," Kimia said. "The demos he built that summer impressed every single external visitor."
Learning the lay of the lab
By Tracie Sweeney
A career in research is a distinct possibility for Matthew Di Guglielmo '97, who last summer cloned chimeric tubulins to determine a binding site for taxol, his UTRA project with chemistry Professor John Oliver.
Of the 10 weeks spent in the lab, Di Guglielmo spent eight doing actual hands-on technical work. "The first two weeks I familiarized myself with laboratory and library resources," he aid. "I also worked with a computer database that had amino acid sequence informatino crucial to the project."
Throughout that summer, Di Guglielmo used a high performance liquid chromatography column to separate and purify proteins. He also learned how to do protein assays and scintillation counting, "and became quite proficient at running DNA and protein separating gels."
Di Guglielmo ended his summer project with a poster presentation. "I had run several reactions and had a good deal of data to present, as well as information about my techniques and procedures," Di Guglielmo said. "I was quite excited to see people reading my poster and asking questions."
What did the UTRA experience mean to Di Guglielmo? "Overall," he said, "I learned that I have the basic curiosity, intelligence and methodology for functioning well in a research laboratory environment. I am glad to continue working on the project while I give some more thought to research opportunities."