t's a very different environment from a student's point of view. You're at a much more professional level — you're not just learning how to do it, you're doing it."

When we think of college, most people envision ranks of students diligently taking notes, the startled laughter having just settled out of the air after the professor, a historian of the Middle East, had burst into the lecture hall in a caftan and cried the Islamic call to worship like an apprentice mullah. Or those same ranks stifling yawns with their pencil hands as the professor in E MCH 012 tries to make clear the kinetics of translation, rotation, and plane motion at 8:15 a.m. Or, perhaps, a small group circling a table in the hushed Rare Books Room, squinting at the fishtails and spiders on the parchment pages before them — or paired off before a glass forest of tubes and coils, watching a solution cloud then clear as the silver chloride settles slowly to the beaker's bottom.

The student above means something different. The student above — and the more than 30 others whose experiences are reported in this issue of Research/Penn State — is a researcher.

"It's not like the labs in chemistry class. I probably spent as much time trying to explain what happened as actually doing the experiment. I learned as much doing this as I did all year, maybe in the whole two years I've been at the University.''

"If you're not challenged at Penn State, you aren't looking.''

Last spring, when Carol Cartwright, the former dean for undergraduate programs and vice provost at Penn State (and now the vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of California at Davis), suggested that Research/Penn State publish a special issue on undergraduate students involved in research, we were, quite frankly, skeptical. We knew that the honors students in the University Scholars program were, as seniors, required to write a thesis. But research papers, as we remembered them, did not generally require original research — just a quick hand on the LIAS keyboard, the diligence to search Pattee Library until the requisite number of books and journal articles were amassed, and the necessary skill to recombine that data into a well-argued paper.

We also knew, however, that Cartwright was a cofounder of the Alliance for Undergraduate Education: A Project of 12 Public Research Universities, an organization devoted to "finding ways to capitalize on . . . the obvious benefits for undergraduates'' at Penn State, UCLA and Berkeley, Ohio State, and the Universities of Illinois, Maryland at College Park, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas at Austin, Washington, and Wisconsin at Madison. And that one of the Alliance's goals was to "involve undergraduates in research and public service.'' We decided to accept Cartwright's challenge.

hat we learned surprised us. We found research and creative opportunities for undergraduates in every one of Penn State's 12 colleges and schools — opportunities that ranged from producing a Dadaist film to purifying a gene through recombinant-DNA techniques. We found opportunities for honors students, for students who chose not to enter the University Scholars program, and for students whose educations were not well forecast by their SAT scores or well represented by their grades. After a few weeks, we had to stop looking: We had room in the magazine for less than a quarter of the research projects we had uncovered already.

"I think it's sad that students go through college without getting research experience, because by doing research, I got so much more out of my classes. What the professors said was so much more concrete.''

"The professors here are so committed to research, they are able to bring some of that fresh knowledge into the classroom experience. If you're in a smaller school where you're just learning the material for itself and you don't see how it relates to what's going on today, it doesn't mean as much to you.''

The question of teaching versus research is often raised at Penn State: The University is both a major undergraduate school (one out of every 10 college students in Pennsylvania go to Penn State; one out of every 225 college graduates in the United States is a Penn State alumnus) and a major research university (ranked 11th in terms of money spent on research and development and in the top 10 in terms of faculty receiving Fulbright and Guggenheim awards). In the last few years, public research universities like Penn State have been sharply criticized in a number of reports for "putting laboratory work and grant dollars ahead of students, teaching, and learning,'' according to the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which announced the formation of the Alliance for Undergraduate Education. "It's no secret that we take a lot of heat for not paying attention to undergraduates, for letting research drive the university,'' Cartwright told the Chronicle. "We need to tell our story better.''

The focus of the debate, suggests Cartwright, is off: Rather than emphasizing teaching over research (or vice versa), a public research university like Penn State should strive for teaching through research. As Penn State's Council of Academic Deans said in an April 1988 statement on Excellence in Undergraduate Education, ""The comprehensive research university delivers undergraduate education that cannot be duplicated in any other setting. By using research laboratories, special library collections, and academic computing facilities to enhance the instructional environment and resources for undergraduate students, special opportunities continually develop for complementing classroom education. These opportunities exist because we have a single faculty teaching the full range of undergraduate and graduate courses.''

Explained the faculty adviser for a student whose work we report in this issue, ""With this degree, what he's going to be doing in the future is working in a laboratory, and all the book learning he can get will not be the same as getting in the lab and using some of the equipment — having something work for him and having something not work for him.''

And there are other reasons for doing research:

"You work at it quite a while and it gets frustrating. Then you find one that works and you do it over and over again six or seven times and then you see the problem sort of fall apart. And nobody else had ever seen it that way.''

"I had an incredible thrill figuring it out.''