On Thursday, August 31, MSMS research students got a chance to explore their future ‘work’ settings during a much-anticipated visit to Mississippi State University.

“Research is a partnership with Mississippi State where our students are able to go and essentially work as undergraduate researchers before they actually become undergraduate students,” explained Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, who teaches AP chemistry at MSMS and acted as chaperone on the trip.

“Most students do science and engineering, but we’ve had students in math, computer science, anthropology, psychology. We have one probably next semester that will be in linguistics. I think we’ve had political science. So pretty much anything that a student’s interested in, we can find a mentor.”

Research student Leah Petit said, “I’m interested in pretty much anything mechanical engineering, specifically this research is about the computer simulations for…solid physics.”

“I mostly just wanted to get a better understanding of what I would be able to do if I decided to do some kind of research in the future, like, actual research that I get paid to do,  and whether I wanted to go that way with engineering or whether I wanted to work, like, in industry, and so it felt like this would be a good way to determine that,” she added.

Research is quite a popular class at MSMS, with many students eager to participate; however, few are able to take the class because of stringent scheduling requirements.

Dr. Morgan explained, “There are a lot of people interested; scheduling is always the limiting factor. In order to participate in research, students have to have a minimum of four to four and a half hours in the lab at MSU, and they have to be in at least two hour blocks of time, and so a lot of students just can’t fit that sort of time commitment in their schedules.” Of the thirty-six students who signed up for research in the first semester, only eleven were able to add the class.

Over the course of the trip, students got to tour the labs they were assigned as well as meet their mentors and learn a little bit about the kind of research that they will be doing. Mentor Emily Shelby described her area of study; “My name is Emily Shelby, I am a grad student pursuing my Master’s in the Biology Department at MSU, I work in the Counterman lab, where, right now, I rear butterflies and caterpillars. And I do field work.”

Shelby’s research focuses on genetics. “Yes, it has genetic implications, so I raise the butterflies and the caterpillars so that way we can do genetic tests on them and we can look at wing patterns and UV patterns and their life histories in the wild as well as in a lab setting.”

After completing their individual tours, students boarded the bus back to MSMS; most seemed very excited at the prospect of returning to do research in a professional lab setting. The research class officially starts this week.