For over 40 years, undergraduate research has been the focus for all geology majors at Middlebury College. Middlebury students have undertaken a wide variety of topics. Depending on the faculty member, students can do local environmental topics (e.g. malformation of Vermont frogs due to high metal concentration in marsh sediment, water quality and hydrodynamics in Lake Champlain), structural and petrology theses (e.g. Acadian sheeted dikes in Vermont, geochemistry of greenstones in Vermont), to marine studies in Antarctica or the North Atlantic. Students choose to do independent research in those areas that interest them.

Seniors are required to do research for an entire year and we encourage all undergraduate students to participate in independent research at any time (either for a semester or as summer research assistants). Students are encouraged to actively participate in the design of their research and we emphasize hands-on investigative work. Though most students collect their own data, this is not mandatory. To achieve a meaningful project we encourage weekly meetings to keep the students on task with specific goals. To emphasize the importance of their research, we encourage students to present their research at state and/or national meetings and in some cases assist them in writing their work for referred journals. For the year-long senior work we organize senior seminars that focus on the process of writing a scientific paper to preparing for oral presentations.

For the faculty member, the benefits of working with undergraduates are numerous. Students are excited and feel part of a significant research program. Their work is often a small portion of a faculty’s research project and usually is combined with other student work into a final paper. The success of our program is evident by the number of alumni who state that their independent research and/or senior work was the most rewarding effort they had done as a geology major. Many alumni feel that it gave them the confidence to enter graduate work in geology, or gave them the skills to tackle a new job with confidence.