What It Is

Mentored Student Learning is a Brigham Young University initiative designed to create significant hands-on research and academic study opportunities for undergraduate students and their professors. These mentoring opportunities provide wonderful and practical learning environments while also discovering important solutions to difficult problems that result in blessing the lives of people around the world.

Why It Is a Priority

Solutions to such things as world hunger, cleaner water, better health, or overcoming problematic family relationships come with a price. It takes time, persistence, and frequently requires equipment that a department or college might not have sufficient resources to acquire. In some instances, and with minimal dollars, undergraduates have used their incredible ingenuity to build their own equipment. One example is the ultra-high vacuum chamber a handful of engineering undergraduates built that was used by physics students to construct the image mirrors that captured photographs of the plasma in earth's magnetosphere for NASA. It is amazing to see what students can do when given the opportunity.

Faculty can request undergraduate student assistance in a project or students can propose projects of their own, contingent upon finding a faculty member who is willing to participate with the student. These one-on-one student/faculty activities are generally funded through the Office of Research and Creative Activities, or ORCA. Under this program, the student, not the faculty member, receives the grant, and has up to one year, generally, to complete the project.

What It Does and How It Helps

One student who began as a freshman research assistant was given the opportunity during her sophomore year to work on DNA samples taken from mummies discovered in a huge burial ground several miles from Cairo. That excavation was the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary. Another student spent almost a year in Tanzania researching if, and how, tuberculosis passes from cow's milk to the people. Still another is doing comprehensive research on papilloma virus associated with most cervical cancers.

Several undergraduates are experimenting with robots to see if they can be programmed to perform both dangerous and ordinary tasks, even "learning" how to distinguish shadows from other objects and "determining" if such objects are be avoided. The students who took part in the NASA project to photograph Earth's magnetosphere are now developing very difficult-to-build mirrors to filter out certain molecular substances surrounding Mars, and if that is successful, they will produce similar image mirrors to gather images of Venus.

Most of these undergraduates have opportunities to present papers on their research at regional and national academic conferences that are heavily attended by faculty scholars from the nation's leading universities. Consequently, many papers are published in leading scientific journals.

BYU presenters are often presumed to be graduate or PhD students, and when scholars from other universities find out that these students are undergraduates, they are greatly surprised. As a result, BYU undergraduates are recruited for graduate studies at these institutions. Their impressive scholarship and personal conduct are gaining acclaim within the academic community, and among corporations and institutions who seek to hire them. They prove to be capable, productive employees who produce and set standards for others to follow. There are, however, more students interested in pursuing these experiences than there are monies to fund them.

We invite you to help provide the funding necessary to expand these comprehensive, meaningful research projects at BYU. With your assistance these students will be able to obtain the resources required to conduct the best possible research that will, in turn, help solve many of the world's most critical problems.