On Monday, I took part in UT’s Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement, or EUReCA. EUReCA is meant to give students in all fields the ability to display their undergraduate research projects to the public with the possibility to win cash prizes for their efforts. Students are separated into categories based on their projects, including music, business, agriculture sciences, engineering, etc., so competition is limited to students within your own field.

First off, I would like to say that undergraduate research has been one of the most positive aspects of my academic career. While I believe that learning in the classroom is beneficial, I think that the practical application of material in a lab setting is equally as crucial to academic development. There are definitely areas of the biological sciences that I knew of and about before working in the Center of Environmental Biotechnology, but I didn’t truly understand what they meant to science as a whole until working with them on a daily basis. However, based on my single experience, I will now say that I think EUReCA cheapens this idea. Given the level of competition, I didn’t expect to win any prizes. However, I did look forward to getting some educated feedback on my project. I found that EUReCA was not the place to do this.

There are several issues that I found with the entire process. To begin with, I knew of a few individuals whose research professors provided or attempted to provide them with research projects to present that they (the students) never actually worked on. This comes from an innate desire for the research professors to have as many of their students or students in their departments win prizes, thus making the professors or their departments look good to the rest of the university. Unfortunately, this teaches the rest of the students competing that their research, which may have taken anywhere from 10-20 hours a week in the lab for the entire year, never really had a shot to begin with. As an undergrad, it’s hard to compete with work that a Ph.D. performed that had already won grant money in its own right. I also knew individuals who were judged by faculty members that they both knew and worked with, also setting themselves up with a distinct advantage over the other competitors.

Another issue I had with the judging process is that many of the judges seemed completely and totally uninterested in the students’ research. They did not take the necessary time or effort to even begin to understand the projects they were judging. For example, my project involved engineering plasmids to put into yeast cells that gave them the ability to glow at variable light levels in response to glucose concentrations in a given solution. In layman’s terms, this means I’m trying to get yeast to glow brighter when exposed to greater levels of glucose in a solution.

One practical application this can be used for is that biofuel researchers can more easily determine what how much ethanol they should theoretically be able to get from a given glucose solution. However, I did no research on the fermentation process that gets you from glucose to ethanol, I don’t know much about it, and there’s really no reason that I needed to. I worked with the development of light producing enzymes. However, one of the only questions I was asked was how much ethanol would I get from “X” grams of glucose.

The judge put so little time or effort into understanding my project that they weren’t even able to compose a question that was relevant to my field of research, which was disappointing given the amount of time I put into it. I had many friends who had this same experience and believe it was a widespread issue at the competition.

All in all, I think EUReCA is a good idea in theory. I believe that undergraduate achievement in research is critical in higher education in that it helps to expand students’ minds past simple academic theory and on into problem solving. However, if UT is not going to take its competitions seriously enough to establish basic guidelines or monitor the system for unfair advantages, then I don’t see the need for most students to participate in the future.

— Hunter Tipton is a senior in microbiology. He can be reached at [email protected].