The 2018 Undergraduate Research Symposium @UMN

By Kate Peterson
Undergraduate Services Librarian

The Undergraduate Research Symposium — an annual research fair at the University of Minnesota — gives all UMN undergraduate researchers a chance to share their research, and scholarly and creative projects with the University community.

We were so pleased to be able to talk with students about their great research at the April 20, 2018 Undergraduate Research Symposium. The U Libraries support students in many aspects of their research — along with many units around campus including the Office of Undergraduate Research and in all the Colleges.

How we support students

• Students access our article databases like Web of Science or PubMed to find scholarly and academic articles which form the foundation for their own research.
• We have a workshop called “Think Like a Researcher” for first- and second year students to get introduced with how to get started with faculty sponsored research and creative projects.
• We help students connect with the Experts@MN tool — which students can use to connect with potential faculty mentors and research projects.
• We meet one-on-one with students while they work on research or UROP proposals to find articles written by faculty members and seminal articles on their research topics
• We help students connect with data they can use in their projects. For example, Alicia, our government documents librarians helps find data created by government agencies. Ryan, our map librarian, helps students create maps and add data layers based on their unique projects.
• We can help students with research tools — from learning about tools like Zotero or Mendeley which organize PDFs and automatically create bibliographies to creating logical file naming structures for long term access to data.
• Our Archives and Special Collections have been the inspiration for research projects including analysis of documents or historical records in our collections.  
• We teach workshops for students on designing scientific posters and have created an online tutorial on Communicating Your Research with Posters. Our Map Library also helps with student poster printing.
• We select posters to display in our coffee shops and around the Libraries to help share the great work by students.
• The completed posters are also archived in the University Digital Conservancy. Browse or search over 1000 posters. These posters are used by students to get a sense of what research can look like and for ideas for their own projects.

Photos from the Symposium