Last Tuesday, SSMU hosted its second annual Forum on Undergraduate Education . The forum allowed students to propose and discuss ideas about the role of undergraduate students at McGill.
“This is the second year that we’ve had the event,” Emily Yee Clare, SSMU VP University Affairs, said. “It was started last year [in order to] create a forum where [students] would come together and talk about academic issues and how undergraduates [at McGill] are basically placed within a research-intensive environment.”
As a research-intensive university, McGill emphasizes the involvement of graduate students, who are able to engage in original academic research. This raises questions about how undergraduates fit into the process. Not having been properly trained to contribute to research, it may be difficult for them to contribute to the research.
The forum began with two public speakers who discussed how undergraduates can be more effectively integrated into the world of real academic research.
“The opportunities for undergraduate students to have some engagement in research provides opportunities really to engage in [certain] fundamental [aspects of research] … that are really important outcomes of an undergraduate education, [and] can be difficult to get within the standard course structure,” speaker Laura Winer, Associate Director of Teaching and Learning Services, said.
Speakers discussed the necessity for undergraduate students to have the opportunity to engage in authentic academic research in order to develop certain skills necessary to make real contributions to future research.
“When you engage in research, you understand how knowledge is created and refined,” Winer said. “People have to learn these skills and how to apply them in such a way where the fruits of their labour will have a certain validity.”
During the second part of the forum, students had the opportunity to put forward their own ideas about how McGill could better integrate the average student into more advanced levels of research. This raised topics such as the allocation of study space on campus, the quality of lectures, and the practicality of undergraduate degrees in general.
The forum differed in structure from the previous year’s. Rather than having a long period for students to make comments and ask questions to the speakers, students chose this year to sit at one of five tables, with each table focusing on a different issue of discussion while SSMU representatives wrote down points that were raised. After fifteen minutes, students were asked to move to another table to talk about a different issue. After three rotations, the forum was over.
“We found that the format of round-table discussions … really allowed for students to have a good understanding of the issues,” Clare said. “It really allowed us to get some concrete ideas from students and allowed students to be very honest about how they felt about different issues.”
While the speakers focused specifically on how to promote undergraduate engagement in research, the table discussion period allowed for a wider range of issues to be discussed without drifting very far from the general theme of research and how it can be facilitated.
Although organizers of the event felt that they received a lot of information to work with in order to improve undergraduate research at McGill over the next year, some students who attended did not receive the impression that much is actually going to be done for them.
“It was nice to get my feelings out, but because I’m in my second [to] last year, I don’t feel like any of the things that I’m saying are really going to be effective for me,” Mathura Ravishankar, U2 arts and science student, said. “To be honest, we raised a lot of issues but did not come up with practical solutions.”
