The Director's Corner
The Director's Corner
March 3, 2026
Research as Quest for the Rare
Hello to the Auburn Honors community, especially to our students. I hope that you are all doing well as we move towards the midpoint of the semester.
I am dedicating this Director’s Corner to the topic of undergraduate research: what it is, why it is important, and what we are doing in the Honors College to support it.
If you are like me, images of white-coated scientists in laboratories, usually holding test tubes with colorful, bubbling liquids, leaps to mind. Certainly research includes these kinds of settings and activities, but it also includes many more fields and endeavors. Research projects take place in rare book libraries, in fields and forests, in front of laptops, in art studios, and through interviews and focus groups, as well as in countless other settings.
My favorite definition of research comes from the author, filmmaker, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, whom we can also claim as a local author since she was born in nearby Notasulga. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Hurston wrote, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
I also find it illuminating that the English word “research” has origins in a Middle French word “recerche,” which means “rare.” What binds together all research activities is their focus on discovering something made rare and thus valuable through its scarcity in human awareness, a scarcity of being known. Research brings us into awareness of things we have not known just through the ordinary activities of living. These things discovered can be new living species, new cures for diseases, new planets, but they can also be new methods, old texts and historical events brought for the first time to modern awareness, and new works of art.
It is typical to think of research as what professors and graduate students do, but undergraduate research is very much on the rise nationally, not least because it yields such powerful benefits for students in their educational preparation for life after college. Research situates students in active learning environments where they take responsibility for their own learning, engaging in discovery while they make measurable contributions to a project that has tangible outcomes. When students are part of a research team, they also hone their skills at collaboration, which is indispensable in almost every career.
Auburn boasts a robust Office of Undergraduate Research, directed by Lorenzo Cremaschi, professor of Mechanical Engineering, which awards undergraduate research fellowships to students as they work under the mentorship of faculty across the university, while also integrating those students into a university-wide network of researchers who are passionate about their work.
In the Honors College, we have launched several initiatives to complement the opportunities offered by the Undergraduate Research Office and discipline-based colleges. These include our new “Research Venture Lyceums,” which bring together small groups of Honors students with faculty for introductory-level research experiences early in students’ undergraduate studies, so that they can learn what research is like and build connections with mentors for more advanced future projects.
Part of my goal is to exponentially increase the number of Honors students who graduate from Auburn University with a transformative research experience, enjoying the benefits of those experiences in their further education and career.
In our own quest to meet our goals, we have placed research support at the center of our fundraising for this year, especially for Tiger Giving Day. Gifts for Tiger Giving Day will go directly to our students in two ways: “research support” grants, which assist with the costs of conducting research, such as laboratory or studio supplies, and “conference travel grants,” which help students attend national and international conferences so that they can present the outcomes of their research projects to the broader scholarly community.
To our students, I warmly encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities we look forward to offering you in the coming months and years to get involved with research. To our broader community, I invite you to share in the project of bringing these opportunities to our students, so that many more of them can embark on their own projects of discovering what has been rare in our known world and sharing that discovery with others.
Laura Stevens, Ph.D
Honors College Director
Professor of Engilsh
