For some professors or department chairs, success means seeing their students perform at a concert; for others, it means watching their students teach English in foreign countries. For Roger Goodwill, the chair of the biology department, success means seeing a picture of crab larva on the cover of the 2011 “Microscopic World” calendar, among other things.
BYU–Hawaii biology department students Kalie Johnson, Kristine Magnusson, and Cierra Fugal worked with staff at the University of Hawaii to be trained in electron microscopy to further research they were doing on crab larvae. The research was sponsored by the Faculty Assisted Student Training (FAST) Program, a resource at BYU–Hawaii that allows students to “focus upon their undergraduate research and receive financial compensation for their research projects while earning degree credit and gaining relevant laboratory research experience.” Students who participate in the FAST program are able to gain hands-on research experience that graduate school application committees look for. According to Goodwill, “Everybody who applies [to graduate school] has a good GPA. Everybody who applies has good letters of recommendation. Everybody who applies has acceptable MCAT scores. But not everybody who applies has undergraduate research experience…Research experience is the icing on the cake. If you presented a poster at a conference, then you’ve got the sprinkles on the icing. And if you’ve been an author of a published paper, now you’ve got the cherry on top.”
For this reason, Goodwill and his colleagues in the biology department are doing all they can to get students involved in research, publication, and presenting as early as they can. “We’re very hot on undergraduate research,” he says. The students are very appreciative of the efforts of the faculty and staff. “If I could name one thing that has helped me progress as a biologist, it would be working with the [FAST] program,” says student Kalie Johnson. “Hands-on experience is really how you learn about the subject.”
In the process of gaining this hands-on experience at the University of Hawaii, the students met Dennis Kunkel, a photomicrographer who had been searching for samples of crab larvae to photograph to complete a calendar he was compiling. According to Goodwill, “Our students didn’t actually take the picture, but as Dr. Bybee says, they did everything except push the button. All the field work – collecting, keeping momma crab happy until the babies hatched, and then collecting those larvae forms, preserving them, and going through the whole process of preparing them to be photographed with the electron microscope – was all done by our students.”
In addition to the exceptional research experiences offered to students, the biology department also provides unique experiences with graduate-level equipment. Goodwill states, “Church education and the university have been very generous with us in purchasing state-of-the-art equipment for us to use. People who understand science and science equipment are amazed for a school of our size to have the sophisticated equipment that we do.” Kristine Magnusson says that through using the equipment the department supplies, “My questions of the whys and hows that often come with learning theories are answered.”
Photos courtesy of Kalie Johnson