Fifteen community college students were in the spotlight during Research Week at the University of the District Columbia Community College (UDC-CC) earlier this month.
All of them are members of the Interdisciplinary Research Club that the college launched last fall to provide a centralized structure for community college students in various majors to add research to their learning experiences.
Michael Ha, the visiting assistant professor of natural sciences who oversees the club, said he and his colleagues are trying to create a culture of research so community college students “really understand what primary research is ‒ to create their own data, to create their own methods, to gather information, to create new knowledge.”
Ha is an experienced researcher, whose biography lists 30 journal publications and more than 80 conference presentations. Ha came to the U.S. from the United Kingdom to do Covid research during the height of the pandemic. He received the Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence in Mentorship Award in 2021 from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the Best Paper Presentation Award in 2023 from the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress.
Included research in courses
For the past 10 years, UDC community college students have been able to participate as collaborators on various projects led by the university’s faculty researchers. This is a typical approach because students do not know what original research is until they see a professor doing it and most two-year college instructors are not engaged in research, Ha said.
For the Interdisciplinary Research Club, however, Ha reached out to the community college faculty members to inquire if they would mentor student researchers or incorporate research in their courses. The latter approach is what Ha has done in the anatomy and public health information technology courses he teaches. Several of his students presented their studies on the impact of social media on public health, and a mortuary science major presented data from his examination of the university’s records about the cadavers donated to the mortuary science program.
Ha said it’s exciting to see student researchers gain skills that help them critically assess public health information.
Anil Pyakuryal, visiting assistant professor of physical and natural sciences, is similarly proud of his four mentees, who made presentations at UDC. Their project topics ranged from quantum science and artificial intelligence, to radiological treatments of cancer. Two of the students are preparing for technical careers and two students plan to transfer to baccalaureate programs.
One of Pyakuryal’s mentees, Patrick Hall, also presented his research on quantum computation tools at the American Association of Physics Teachers’ meeting in Saint Louis in January.
“I think that the research that I’ve completed so far with Dr. P. has really set a foundation to really build upon for other research projects, especially in the way of more qualitative work,” Hall said.
Even before the Interdisciplinary Research Club started, Pyakuryal mentored community college researchers. Over the years, some of them have presented research at international conferences and several of his current mentees are preparing to publish their research findings.
Balancing school, work, research and more
Pyakuryal noted that his four current mentees have demonstrated passion for their topics and patience when their experiments did not yield positive results. He added that all of his current mentees have jobs, which means their team meetings have sometimes occurred in the late evening to accommodate the students’ work schedules.
Ahmecia Williams, a nursing student who works as a behavioral health technician in a psychiatric facility, signed up to do research as a way of learning more about different aspects of healthcare to help her decide whether to become a nurse anesthetist, a physician or to pursue another career path that can be accessed after earning a nursing degree.
Adding research to her schedule of classes and work has already sharpened her time management skills, she said.
“You also have to make sure that you don’t overwhelm yourself. I have classes from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m., back-to-back with a very short break. I make sure that in the morning before class I wake up early enough to go over stuff. In the evening when I get home, I make sure I go over stuff before I go to bed.”
She continued: “I don’t work on the days that I have to go to school. That is a lot, and my brain can only do so much. So I just manage my time well, make sure that I set a good schedule and hopefully things work out well. Of course, you can’t always schedule life. Life happens sometimes and things happen… but when those things do happen, you just make sure that you already had a structured life that is not too difficult to fall back into.”
Williams’ Research Week presentation was an overview of several types of radiation therapy and report on their rates of success treating various types of cancer.
Other research
In addition to his research project on quantum teleportation, Eyob T. Bulti chose to compare quantum science innovations in the U.S. and China for an English class assignment.
“I wanted to relate the two and learn more about the field that kind of grow out my scope and knowledge of the field,” he said.
As a result of what he’s learned through the club-facilitated research and coursework, Bulti plans to pursue additional degrees in quantum science or cybersecurity. He will complete his associate degree this spring.
When asked what he learned about himself by doing original quantum science research, Bulti thought for a minute and said, “Mostly about how I can get interested in something very quickly and learn about it. Like I want to dive deep into stuff; I don’t find it fulfilling to learn just about the surface-level-appearing stuff.”
Yanlong Li signed up through the club to do research with Pyakuryal because he wanted to learn something about artificial intelligence (AI) that was different from the nursing program he is enrolled in.
“I want to learn different methodology,” he said, adding he expects that in the future AI technologies will be used everywhere.
Along the way he’s learned, “It’s also very cool that through the research project [you] meet very clever and different students,” Li said.
At UDC, he presented his research on intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatment of prostate cancer, and feasibility studies on AI-guided treatment.
Initial research club outcomes
Ha considers the community college students’ Research Week presentations as evidence that a new research culture has started at the urban community college, where about 80 students have signed up for the Interdisciplinary Research Club. The 15 presenters are among the students who are the most actively involved in the club.
“I’m not trying to cure cancer, win the next Nobel Prize, do million-dollar research,” Ha said of the club, noting that he aims to make students and faculty aware that research is for everyone. “Research should be something that everyone has access to, can understand how it works.”
“What I hope to see in the future [is] if someone comes into UDC – the community college – if they want to know what research is, they can easily find that answer. And if they want to get involved, they know who to talk to,” Ha said.
