Information • Textbooks • Media • Resources
CIRRUS: A Chemistry Internet Resource for Research by Undergraduate Students
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Dean A. Waldow, Craig B. Fryhle, and J. Chris Bock Department of Chemistry, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA 98447 Participation in research can be pivotal in an undergraduate’s growth toward a profession in chemistry. The research experience can be an important extension of the classroom, integrating the chemical knowledge students have been building throughout their course work. Research can also be a focal point for a student’s course work. CIRRUS, the Chemistry Internet Resource for Research by Undergraduate Students, is provided as an Internetbased resource in support of the undergraduate chemical research enterprise. It is a World Wide Web (WWW) (1) site at http://www. chem.plu.edu/cirrus.html containing a variety of information and links pertinent to undergraduate research in chemistry. CIRRUS also supports communication and information-sharing by providing a companion electronic mail server as a resource for communication focused on chemical research by undergraduate students. Recent articles have described the WWW (2) in relation to chemistry and provided an example of its use in chemical education (3). Undergraduates conduct chemical research at many college, university, industrial, and government labs. The richness of this endeavor can be seen by the many regional and national undergraduate research symposia sponsored by the American Chemical Society, Council on Undergraduate Research, and other organizations. Yet while undergraduate research in general is strong, individual participants can find themselves isolated and limited to interactions with peers and faculty at their home institutions. The number of researchers in a given field is usually much smaller in an undergraduate environment than in graduate and industrial settings. Furthermore, far fewer students in undergraduate settings are able to attend national meetings and engage in peer discussions with researchers than are students in graduate research environments. It may also be difficult for undergraduate students to learn about off-campus research opportunities and other programs that can help them build a broad sense of community with their undergraduate chemistry research peers. One of the goals of CIRRUS is to address these issues by fostering an Internet-wide sense of community among those involved in undergraduate research—both students and mentors. Some of the information hosted by CIRRUS includes listings of summer research opportunities, fellowship and scholarship information, electronic mail list service, chemistry undergraduate research symposia, a directory of chemistry clubs, and a collection of NMR free induction decays. In addition, CIRRUS maintains a set of links to other chemistry resources such as the Journal of Chemical Education, NIH, NSF, ACS, career information, and chemistry-related services such as Chemical Abstracts On-line and the Virtual Chemistry Library. Under development as a future addition to CIRRUS is a WWW undergraduate chemistry research conference/poster session. Undergraduate researchers will be able to put a paper or poster on-line using CIRRUS as the symposium site and “organizer”. While the CIRRUS mail server is already a vehicle for on-line discussion, it will serve as an on-line meeting place for participants during the future symposium.
Example: Summer Research Opportunities An example of a service provided by CIRRUS is the hosting of a collection of undergraduate summer research opportunities. Students can use this list to find potential summer research programs in chemistry. To access this information, users would select the link entitled “Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunities” from the CIRRUS home page. This link provides a list of institutions that are hosting summer research programs. The information in the list has either been submitted to CIRRUS directly by a person from the institution offering the program (using the automated submission form described below) or it has been entered into CIRRUS by us from summer research announcements we have seen. Each entry includes contact information, an electronic mail address if available, the deadline for applications, and other specific program information. For some summer research sites the listing also provides a URL that can be used to jump directly to the site’s web page for further information. Universities, private institutions, and government labs are the primary groups offering summer research positions and many of the universities participate in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. If you are a research mentor at an institution sponsoring a summer research program, you can easily add your information to the CIRRUS list using the “form” page provided. The information entered will be automatically processed by a common gateway interface (CGI) program and a reply page will be sent to you with all the information formatted as it will be seen in CIRRUS. The information will be added to CIRRUS during the next update, usually only a few days after it has been received. Email List Server CIRRUS’s electronic mail list service was established to enhance communication between people involved in any area relevant to undergraduate chemical research. It provides a forum for discussion on a wide variety of topics such as specific research areas, graduate school selection, mentorships for women and other underrepresented groups, and career opportunities. To subscribe, send the message “subscribe cirrus FirstName LastName” from your normal electronic mail account to
[email protected]. (The subject line is ignored.) Once you’ve joined the CIRRUS list, you can contribute to the conversation by sending your email to
[email protected]. Your electronic mail will automatically be distributed to all the other people who have subscribed to the list. If you prefer, you can be just an onlooker of the discussion, by simply reading the postings that are delivered to your electronic mail address from the list server. The CIRRUS Email List is also a place to post news and information about summer and academic year undergraduate research programs, mentorship programs, scholarship and fellowship opportunities, and any other type of information useful to those involved in undergraduate chemical research.
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Information • Textbooks • Media • Resources Concluding Remarks CIRRUS also includes a link to the FTNMR FID Archive. This is a collection of high-field Fourier transform NMR free induction decay (FID) data for small organic molecules. The archive includes proton, carbon and attached proton test data. The site provides an educational resource for teaching and learning about Fourier transform NMR spectroscopy (4). After this brief introduction, we invite your participation. CIRRUS is intended to be a growing resource for the chemistry undergraduate research community. Hence, we hope you will use the forms pages in CIRRUS to submit further information pertinent to undergraduate research.
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Lastly, we welcome your comments. Simply use the “Suggestion Box” link in the CIRRUS home page. Acknowledgment Development of CIRRUS and its associated computer hardware was supported through grant BIR-9414026 from the National Science Foundation. Literature Cited 1. See URL: http://www.w3.org/ for more information about the WWW. 2. Mounts, R. D. J. Chem. Educ. 1996, 73, 68–71. 3. Tissue, B. M. J. Chem. Educ. 1996, 73, 65–68. 4. Fryhle, C. B.; Waldow, D. A.; Bock, J. C. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 442.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 74 No. 4 April 1997
