May-June 2010

by Bernhard Streitwieser, Gregory Light, and Pilar Pazos

An undergraduate was recently asked to write an essay about his first experience working in a university science laboratory. After providing a general rundown of his daily activities, he zeroed in on his favorite part: monitoring an experiment he had prepared. “The tension increases hour-by-hour until that one moment of heartbreak, triumph, or better yet—confusion!”

This brief statement, with its tone of thriller-novel tension, conveys a passion all of us in higher education would like to see our students feel about their learning experiences. It also conveys a realization the student had about working in science, something that hours of lecture and pages of textbook might never reveal: science takes time, the stakes can be high, and sometimes the best results are not results at all but prompts to further inquiry that may hold out the possibility for significant discovery.

Bernhard Streitwieser is a senior research associate at Northwestern University’s Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, a teaching associate in the School of Education and Social Policy, and a former lecturer in the German department. Greg Light is the director of the Searle Center and an associate professor in the School of Education and Social Policy. He has taught postgraduate courses in higher and professional education and consulted across the higher and professional education sector in the UK, the US, and Canada. Pilar Pazos is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Management & Systems Engineering at Old Dominion University. Previously she held a joint position at Northwestern’s Searle Center and the VaNTH (Vanderbilt, Northeastern, Texas, Harvard/MIT) Engineering Research Center.

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