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School of Business > UPDATE > Spring 2002 > Article Undergraduate Research
Conducting research with School of Business faculty members is not an opportunity reserved exclusively for graduate students. Undergraduates chosen for the Business Scholars program, for example, are matched with School of Business faculty to assist in research. Other undergraduates take the initiative to develop their own research idea to be conducted under the watchful eye of a School of Business faculty member. A good example of such an independent research project was conducted by Alison E. Helland, who graduated in December 2001. She conducted the research project with Management Professor Randall B. Dunham during her final semester. Her project documented the process she went through in developing a "toolbox" for the Madison, Wisconsin-based American Alliance of Cancer Pain Initiatives (AACPI), a national organization that provides leadership and support to the efforts of State Cancer Pain Initiatives across the country. As an intern with the Alliance, Helland had determined that the national organization needed a better way to help state initiative leaders, many of whom were nurses, pharmacists and social workers who lacked experience in managing a non-profit organization. The material Helland prepared covered everything from the basics of developing a mission statement, grants and fund raising, to pointers for creating and working with boards of directors. It ended up being one of nine projects to receive the university's prestigious Wisconsin Idea Undergraduate Fellowship for 2001-2002. Helland worked with Mary Bennett, outreach director at AACPI, and June Dahl, a professor at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacology, to develop materials that gathered in one place the administrative information the state initiatives were likely to need, with examples of "best practices" from state initiatives across the United States. At the same time, she developed her work as an independent research project for the School of Business. She wrote a thesis, "Organizational Development Support for Non-profit Organizations," that outlined her efforts for AACPI and put it into the context of theories and research in the field of organizational development. Dunham supervised Helland's thesis with input on the non-profit perspective from Faculty Associate Joan Gillman. Helland's was one of four independent research projects by undergraduates that Dunham supervised during the fall semester. "Undergraduates are fun to work with anyway, but it's a real joy to work with students who are willing to do something extra like this," Dunham said. For independent research projects, students conduct literature searches, examine current practices and learn how to evaluate their own research project. "It's something they have to really want to do, it's not required, and it's a lot of work," Dunham said. Ideally, according to Dunham, student research projects benefit from combining applied and academic pieces. "Alison's work is a great example of this combination," he said, "because the academic theories helped refine the training manual she developed and having an actual project she was working on helped make the theories make sense." For Helland, the chance to conduct research as an undergraduate was "incredibly valuable." She added, "I learned so much. It was wonderful to have the chance to collaborate with faculty and apply what I had learned in class to help overcome some of the barriers that exist for nonprofits." Helland expects both her research skills and real-world experience to be useful when she attends law school beginning next fall.
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