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The importance of undergraduate research:
Undergraduate research allows students to explore their interests in a current and more detailed fashion than they would be exposed to in a classroom lecture. Emerging from high school, students often have ideas of what they would like to be professionally, but often they lack exposure and personal experience in the area. Research allows them to get to be introduced to the foremost experts in these fields who can offer guidance, expertise, and who also get to know students personally. Students get firsthand experience using the scientific method, and learn their field through the lab they work in and also through the major literature.
One of the most surprising aspects of entering research for me was discovering the incredible breadth of my lab’s field, molecular phylogeny and systematics in flowering plants, which employs genetics, molecular biology, chemistry, ecology, and statistics. I learned research offers a freedom to explore a host of specialties: even within my own lab graduate students have greatly different projects, that varied from evolutionary development to population genetics. Most importantly, undergraduate research lets students find out if they really love a field or not.
