These suggestions were offered by faculty members who have worked with Student Research Assistants sponsored by the Humanities Center. Many thanks to Elizabeth Coville (Anthropology), Jason Decker (Philosophy), Adriana Estill (English and American Studies), Daniel Groll (Philosophy), Pierre Hecker (English), Christine Lac (French and Francophone Studies), Christopher Polt (Classics), Meera Sehgal (Sociolgoy), George Shuffelton (English), Shana Sippy (Religion), Eric Tretbar (CAMS), and Carolyn Wong (Political Science) for the ideas listed below.

Training

· Training is important.  Don’t skip it!

· Student-faculty research relationships must evolve over time. Initially, it may be necessary to review carefully student products to check for quality. Students will “learn by doing.”  With experience, students will be able to take on more advanced tasks (and you will better know what you can expect of them).

· As can be seen in student-faculty research in the sciences, teams of students can sometimes be more effective than individuals because students can teach one another.  If funding permits only one student researcher, consider asking that student to record a training video for future SRAs.  

· Working with rising juniors and seniors who may be able to work extensively with a given faculty member allows students to contribute more significantly to faculty projects

Structuring the work

· Be very clear in communicating what it is you need from the student.

· Guard against unrealistic expectations: undergraduate students will not be able to do everything a post-doc or graduate student could do.

· Ongoing communication is essential. If face-to-face meetings are not possible or practicable, faculty may be able to work with students via Skype or by trading documents.

· Sharing documents (whether working online or in person) will create a record of the summer’s activity.

· Consider having the student generate notes of your meetings. (One researcher found that the student note taker naturally reminded him to follow up on items previously tabled in conversations because those loose ends were recorded in the notes.)

· Bring students into your co-author conversations so that you can model what we do in research.

· Consider building a student product into the project so that they have something to show for their work (e.g. a writing sample).  This could be anything from a lit review to an annotated bibliography to a small portion of the research project.

· “Trust but verify” the student’s work.

How students can benefit from participating in a faculty research project

· Mentoring (in a broad sense) is an important part of collaborations.

· “Throwing students into the deep end” stretches them to do more than they thought they were able to do.

· Students learn how the research process really works—including how to make “procrastination” productive time.

· Projects often develop both diligence and problem solving skills.

· Research opportunities can provide extremely useful preparation for graduate study and careers.

How working with students can benefit a faculty member

· Students may bring foreign language skills or cultural/community contacts.

· Engaging students fully in your research stretches you to slow down and clarify your own thinking. 

· Sometimes following up on a student-initiated idea can lead to redefining the current project or to developing further professional projects.

Attribution of student work

· Property rights are not generally recognized for simply “having an idea.” After all, much hard work remains to flesh an idea out, expand it, refine it, write it up, and publish it.  You need not attribute every idea that a student mentioned.  But you might include a footnote stating something like, “The germ of this idea was suggested by Allison Jones in a classroom conversation.”

· We generally try to be generous in attribution, while recognizing that attribution communicates something to colleagues in the field and so our attribution must be honest as well. Students’ work on a project doesn’t make them co-authors. Consider intermediate forms of acknowledgment like author’s notes or footnotes when co-authorship is inappropriate.

· A colleague who works in film suggested that the academy might need to develop alternatives to simple authoring—as in the film industry where a complex system of attribution clearly indicates the type and level of involvement in a project.

Setting up the work position

· If you are hiring a research assistant on your own, the student-work position must be arranged through Student Financial Services (extension 4138) before any work is done. 

· You can use your own PDA dollars to pay for student research assistants. If you have received a Student Research Assistantship from the Humanities Center, the granted funding will be transferred into the student work portion of your PDA.