Here in the land of the Redhawk, huge grants and research that draw national headlines can be hard to come by. Funding is smaller, name recognition is lower and the light of academic prestige afforded to major universities is seldom shined on us.
That doesn’t mean the university isn’t fiercely pursuing the development and expansion of its research opportunities, particularly for undergraduate students. According to the Office of Sponsored Projects’ (OSP) annual report from last year, Seattle U saw a 14% increase in grant proposals from FY23 to FY24, with 40% of new awards including wages for student work. While OSP primarily works on the faculty end of research, other programs are being developed to directly address students.
One such development is the newly established Office of Undergraduate Research (UGR) directed by Tara Roth, a teaching professor of English. The UGR office, a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research, has been designed to help enhance student access to faculty-mentored research and scholarship opportunities. It provides avenues towards research publication, presentation and funding.
This year, the UGR office’s work culminated with the annual Student Research and Creativity Conference (SRCCON). Held May 23, students from numerous departments presented over six hours of research and creative work they had done, including fourth-year chemistry majors who presented their senior synthesis research projects to a packed room of their peers and faculty.
This week, another staple for student research on campus made its annual debut. The Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal (SUURJ), an enduring and recognizable product created to feature undergraduate student research, has just published its ninth edition.
SUURJ, first published back in 2017 under the leadership of former faculty member Molly Clark Hillard, is now led jointly by English professors Roth and Hannah Tracy. The journal prioritizes student engagement and accessibility by having student editors at one end and student author submissions at the other. While being an editor is an accredited class under the English Department, both roles are open to students in all disciplines.
The opportunity to publish research that has been primarily conducted and written by the students themselves is a rare one, and so too is being assigned the bulk of the copyediting work as the student editor for an official publication.
“I think we both really value student research, and we also think it’s really important for there to be a place that showcases, in particular, undergraduate research, because undergraduates usually have a harder time getting published. We also love working with a cohort of student editors over the course of a full year to train them to be copyeditors, developing those relationships, and really trying to expose student editors to a whole range of real-life skills that can help them in their future careers,” Tracy said.
Volume 9 of SUURJ features a wide variety of student work. From a mathematical study predicting momentum in tennis games to SUURJ’s first research-based historical fiction piece exploring the late 19th-century gold rush in Seattle, this year’s edition of the journal continues to shine a light on all kinds of undergraduate research.
“Like just the fact that students and faculty took the time to read my work, I was like, that is enough for me. That was so important. Then it got chosen!” Anabella Vucci, a fourth-year public affairs and women, gender & sexuality studies double major, said.
Vucci’s paper, “Reframing Fat,” explores compulsory thinness, a term used to describe society’s enforcement of and adherence to a thin-fat binary where fat bodies are made subordinate to thin ones. She used popular media like the musical “Hairspray” (2007) as a vessel for her theoretical inquiry.
Vucci felt that her submission and publication process with SUURJ had allowed her to remain engaged with her paper’s subject matter on a level she might not have otherwise, and that these experiences were invaluable.
“Taking something that’s so deeply personal… putting it in an academic setting and being able to talk about it analytically and to show that it’s a theory like any other. For me, it helped demystify the system that controlled me and how I thought about myself. So I started just wanting y’all [SUURJ] to read it. And then I got to work on it with more people, and that was so exciting,” Vucci said.
Another author from this year’s edition, Alonso Lee, a third-year philosophy and history double major, was drawn to his paper’s subject matter by a combination of academic passion and personal experience. The piece, “A Tale of Two Cities,” co-authored by Eve Wiseman and Caleb Stipkovits, investigates pollutant levels in Fresno, Calif., specifically focusing on how racial and class disparities are correlated to environmental outcomes and what policy solutions can be implemented to alleviate said inequities.
“I have family there in Fresno, and I grew up visiting all the time… everybody in Fresno knows the air is bad, but they don’t know why. It’s because there’s been a lack of transparency within the city government,” Lee explained.
This summer, Lee will be starting an internship with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in D.C., a position he said he was inspired to pursue based, in part, on the work he had done on “A Tale of Two Cities.” For both Lee and Vucci, the editing process with SUURJ allowed both authors to revisit their work, adding sections, reworking analysis and refining syntax, in a way that maintained their autonomy over the work while still providing the support and structure necessary to embark on a journey towards publication.
Organizations like SUURJ demonstrate that students do have fantastic access to faculty and on-campus bodies that are constantly striving to develop and promote student work at interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary levels. If you haven’t submitted to SUURJ yet, change that. But most of all, GO READ VOLUME 9 OUT NOW!
