BALTIMORE -- On a cold morning in a Remsen Hall chemistry lab at the Johns Hopkins University, five undergraduates laughed and chatted as they mixed together amino acids and catalysts, trying to better understand the origins of life.
The undergraduates are all premedical students scattered across various majors in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. They share three other traits: They are freshmen, they are first-generation college students and they are women of color.
The five students were chosen to participate in FiGURE, which stands for first-generation undergraduate research experience. According to Hopkins, 21% of its freshman class are first-generation students.
From Jan. 3 to Jan. 20, the students got to conduct experiments in a protein-folding lab, a rare experience for freshmen. If the lab publishes data and findings, their names will appear on the report, an even rarer accomplishment.
Wilson Francisco, the program director of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at the National Science Foundation, said while many students participate in undergraduate research, the number of students who get published is “much, much lower.”
“Having this program specifically made for people like us, it makes it much easier to get into the field of STEM,” participant Kelsey Njembu said. “It’s a good way to, like, dip your toes into the water of doing research because … if I had tried to be, like, in an actual lab, that would have been a bit more daunting.”
The Association of American Universities, which houses the Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, said in an email that leading research universities have made progress over the past 20 years in integrating undergraduates into meaningful research, but there’s still work to do.
The AAU said several universities now offer undergraduate research opportunity programs like FiGURE, the largest of which is the Freshman Research Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. The AAU said much of the research students conduct in that program gets published.
Still, these programs often only benefit a small number of students due to factors like limited capacity and resources, the AAU said.
Thirteen Hopkins students were selected for FiGURE labs from 60 applicants. The students are spread across four labs run by four different professors, mostly concentrated in the life sciences, said Stephen Fried, an assistant professor of chemistry at Hopkins.
In Fried’s lab, for instance, students study protein folding, which Fried said is the process by which protein molecules fold up on themselves to create the 3D shapes that allow them to perform biological functions. Scientists study protein folding to better understand neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Edgar Manriquez-Sandoval is a Ph.D. candidate who assisted the undergraduates in the FiGURE lab. As a first-generation Hispanic student, Manriquez-Sandoval said FiGURE gives him hope for students like him; while he was an undergraduate, Manriquez-Sandoval didn’t have a similar program.
“I hope it inspires other universities to do something similar and recognize that there’s a lot of first-gen students who want these opportunities that don’t necessarily have a direct path of access to science,” Manriquez-Sandoval said.
Fried launched FiGURE last year with just his 10-person lab and six program students after receiving a grant through the National Science Foundation. He said he wanted to home in on undergraduate research because Hopkins professors get a lot of “eager, ambitious students.”
But he noticed in reviewing undergraduates’ resumes that a lot of them came from similar areas, were white or Asian American, and even went to a lot of the same high schools.
“There is this support to recruit these more diverse undergraduate classes,” Fried, who is white, said. “And that was really not reflected in the students who were asking if they could do research.”
Ashma Pandya, a fourth-year, does research in Fried’s lab and assisted with the FiGURE students. She said research is accessible at Hopkins, even for undergraduates. A Hopkins spokesperson said more than 80% of students participate in research at some point in their undergraduate career.
A transfer student from the University of Illinois Chicago, Pandya reached out to Fried about lab openings before she had even accepted her Hopkins offer.
“Every other student here is part of a lab,” Pandya said. “I think a lot of professors here are pretty approachable. And even if you don’t find an opportunity to go meet them in person, you can, like, email them; they will reply to you.”
But Fried said that’s part of the problem — sometimes students who don’t have family members or mentors to guide them don’t know that it’s appropriate, or even possible, to message a professor out of the blue and potentially get a spot on their research team.
“If you come from one background, professors seem like someone that you might have at your dinner table that your parents invited over,” Fried said. “But from another perspective, a professor’s like a very aloof, kind of distant, powerful person that you shouldn’t just write an email to.”
Samanta Lopez, one of the FiGURE students, agreed. While her parents both went to college, they did so in Venezuela, leaving Lopez to navigate aspects of college life like signing up for research on her own. She said it can be “really scary” to cold email a professor.
“I think it’s been so great just to get my foot in the door somewhat because, like, otherwise, I don’t know if I would have tried this,” Lopez said.
It can be difficult for freshmen who haven’t taken some introductory biology or chemistry classes to find a lab to join; being a part of FiGURE can open doors down the line. But some students decide to extend the experience. Fried said two of last year’s FiGURE participants decided to continue doing research in his lab.
Fried said the FiGURE program creates cohorts of students so that those selected don’t feel like the odd person out, surrounded by team members who don’t look like them or share their backgrounds and experiences.
Both Njembu, who is Black, and Lopez, who is Hispanic, drew comfort from being able to connect with other women of color.
“Typically, in, like, STEM fields, it’s definitely dominated by white people and particularly white men. So I think being in a program with other women of color has made it, I guess honestly just a better experience,” Njembu said. “Being around people who are, like, not like me at all, it definitely, like, triggers that impostor syndrome within me.”
According to the American Psychological Association, impostor syndrome is often experienced by high achievers who “attribute their accomplishments to luck rather than to ability, and fear that others will eventually unmask them as a fraud.” It’s often accompanied by anxiety and depression.
Hopkins declined to provide a demographic breakdown of students by major, saying that data isn’t publicly available. The university also declined to share a demographic breakdown by race and gender for student participation in STEM labs.
FiGURE students self-reported information about race and gender, according to data provided by Hanna Jackson, Hopkins’ deputy executive director for student success, who worked with Fried on FiGURE. Of the 13 students, 10 indicated they use she/her pronouns, two indicated they use he/him pronouns and one declined to respond. Six students said they were Hispanic or Latino, five said they were Black, African American or Caribbean, one said they were Asian American, one said they were Indo-Caribbean and one said they were Middle Eastern or North African.
Fried said in selecting students for FiGURE, he was mostly focused on their enthusiasm for science rather than their grade point average or whether they had previous research experience; in fact, he said, a student having previous experience likely indicated they had the “social capital to succeed without a program like this.”
FiGURE is funded in part by Hopkins and in part by the National Science Foundation. Fried said the portion he gets from NSF goes to pay the students. He said unpaid experiences can “systematically privilege students who don’t need to worry about finances” during undergrad.
Anneliese Faustino, a Ph.D. candidate who serves as the project lead of the protein folding lab, said the students earn $750 for their participation in the nearly three-week program.
“We believe that unpaid internships are not equitable and that even freshman students deserve to be paid for their work in the lab,” Faustino said. “They’re producing data. They are working.”
