The undergraduate research experience opens horizons for students to envision pursuing scholarship as a profession. What does it mean to be a professional scholar? How have such conceptions changed through time, and what might the future hold for those who aspire to a “life of the mind”?

Graduate students often engage these questions in an introductory course sometimes called a “professional seminar” — or “prosem” for short. Yet similar courses are rarely offered at the undergraduate level. This curricular gap becomes more significant as more undergraduate students pursue opportunities for mentored scholarly research.

The academic research profession increasingly calls on scholars to explain their work to researchers from other fields, frame their research findings as useful contributions to society, and interact with public audiences. Hence a communication-based perspective provides a useful point of departure for students from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities alike to explore these opportunities and challenges in a collaborative, interdisciplinary seminar setting.

Students in other research programs (e.g. OUR, B.Phil., Brackenridge, UHC Community-Based Research Fellowships) are welcome, but it should be understood that the proseminar is designed to complement, not supplant, the focused learning experiences provided in these other programs. The research opportunities listed above facilitate specific research projects supervised directly by a mentor. This proseminar, by way of contrast, enables students to engage questions that transcend their particular research initiatives and implicate broad issues concerning the academic research profession writ large. Students should be apprised that the course will integrate mindfulness meditation exercises and they should come to the first class meeting having already read Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.

In this seminar, we will:

Frame undergraduate research in historical and contemporary contexts, with particular focus on how the enterprise has changed since the landmark Boyer Report in 1998.

Recognize how emergent interdisciplinary research fields (such as “digital humanities” and “translational medicine”) blur traditional distinctions between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and appreciate how such transformations present novel opportunities (as well as daunting challenges) to professional scholars.

Appreciate ways that the “open access” movement creates opportunities for circulation of scholarship, strains the boundaries of copyright law, presents novel challenges for the publishing industry, and makes possible new metrics of scholarly authority.

Come to terms with the myriad ways that scholarly productivity and impact can be measured, and begin to appreciate the entailments and implications of using particular metrics in certain contexts.

Develop understanding of the term “public intellectual,” and appreciate the texture of controversy it tends to generate in academe and beyond.

Using practice with mindfulness meditation, appreciate ways to exercise the brain in order to improve concentration and cognitive control in an age of information saturation and social media-driven multitasking.

Pursue informed and charitable readings of critical perspectives that tend to view the “professoriate” with suspicion.

Hone written and oral communication skills, including question construction, extemporaneous speaking, speaking from notes and writing crisp prose for diverse audiences.

The interdisciplinary seminar will also afford students to pursue particular learning objectives, tailored to their own disciplinary backgrounds:

Natural Sciences Social Sciences and Humanities • Assess the extent to which your chosen discipline has become “post-academic” (Ziman) and understand the possible implications of this for professional development. • Cultivate an ability to explain the value of your scholarly work to audiences skeptical about “knowledge for knowledge sake.” • Appreciate how humanities and social science learning may leverage work in the natural sciences (e.g. MCAT exam, translational research). • Realize ways that your discipline’s possible reliance on the publication of scholarly books as a quality metric may be at odds with trends in the publishing and business intelligence industries.

Students in other research programs (e.g. OUR fellowship, B.Phil., Brackenridge, UHC Community-Based Research Fellowships) are welcome, but it should be understood that the proseminar is designed to complement, not supplant, the focused learning experiences provided in these other programs. The research opportunities listed above facilitate specific research projects supervised directly by a mentor. This proseminar, by way of contrast, enables students to engage questions that transcend their particular research initiatives and implicate broad issues concerning the academic research profession writ large. Students should be apprised that the course will integrate mindfulness meditation exercises and they should come to the first class meeting having already read Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (hence this blog’s banner image – credit the splendid Holt, Rhineholt and Winston image).

The Undergraduate Research Proseminar is designated by Pitt’s University Honors College as an honors course. See the Honors College website for more on implications of this designation for eligibility and enrollment. When considering registration, also please consider: 1) talented students falling short of the honors-eligible GPA threshold can still enroll in honors courses with permission of the teacher; 2) students taking honors courses tend to earn higher grades in those courses; 3) first-year students have earned top grades in the honors prosem.