Success of Gates endowed scholarship relies on mentors

By Nancy Wick
University Week

Faculty and staff are needed to make an excellent program even better. That’s the message the Office of Undergraduate Education has when speaking of its crown jewel - the Mary Gates Endowment.

Amy Lee, left, and Adrian Fehr unveil a portrait of the late Mary Gates during a ceremony last year dedicating the new Mary Gates Hall. Both Lee and Fehr are Mary Gates scholars. Photo By Mary Levin

“How do you improve the quality of undergraduate education at the University?” Fred Campbell asks rhetorically. “We believe that students experience the highest levels of learning when they work very directly with faculty on path-breaking research or scholarship. Or when students take what they’ve learned in the classroom and go out and work in the community.”

That kind of experiential learning is only possible when faculty and staff step forward to mentor students - which is exactly what the endowment is facilitating. Over the past five years nearly 500 students have become “Mary Gates Scholars,” spending from two to three quarters engaged in either a research or leadership project under the sponsorship of a faculty or staff member or a community leader.

“What we’re trying to do with these awards is give students the luxury of time to pursue something of interest to them,” says Campbell, who is the dean of undergraduate education and vice provost. “Students get a grant to support them so they don’t have to get some other kind of job while they’re working on their research or leadership project.”

What kind of project qualifies? Examples range from a student who went with a group to a remote Indonesian island to study macaque monkeys to a violinist who started a music program at Bailey Boushay House, a facility for people living with AIDS. In each case, the student found a mentor, then submitted an application outlining what they hoped to learn by participating in the project. Applications are reviewed by a faculty panel and awards are given.

The program is made possible by donations from the family of the late Mary Gates, a longtime Regent and wife of current Regent William Gates. When the University was in the process of renovating the former Physics Hall as a center for undergraduates, Campbell explains, many involved in the planning believed that the spirit of the building “matched exactly the vision of Mary Gates, who was unfailingly concerned with the quality of undergraduate education.”

So the Gates family was approached with the proposal of naming the building after her and also of establishing an endowment that would further the ends that Mary Gates was so committed to. The family responded with a $10 million gift, part of which is used for scholarships to students entering the Honors Program and the majority devoted to funding students in research and leadership projects.

That initial gift was in 1995. The first Mary Gates Scholars received their grants in 1996, and the program took off from there. “It has worked amazingly well,” Campbell says. “The quality of students’ work, I think, surprised all of us. The number of faculty who stepped forward to sponsor it surprised all of us. Many faculty have always worked closely with students, of course, but this began to expand the opportunity.”

Mary Gates Scholars are invited to present their research each year at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. Campbell says the symposium was dominated by students in the sciences the first year, but has expanded since to include the arts, humanities and social sciences.

“When we use the word research, we use it broadly to mean students’ involvement in the academic work of the faculty member,” he says. “In the arts, faculty members might not call it research; they might call it artistic development. In the humanities they might call it scholarship.”

Moreover, Campbell believes the kind of experiential education that Mary Gates grants make possible has spread, at least in part because of the visibility of the program. He points out that Mary Gates Scholars represent only a portion of the students who present at the Undergraduate Research Symposium.

“We’re seeing a shift away from the notion that students receive an education simply as a result of their classroom experience, that at the undergraduate level all we need do is place students in classrooms, let them take a certain number of classes and then we’ve educated them,” Campbell says. “We believe the Mary Gates Endowment and the emphasis on experiential learning has begun to shift the culture as to what we define as the highest levels of learning.”

It’s a shift that the Gates family has been very pleased to see. Four years after their initial gift, Regent Gates walked into Campbell’s office one day and announced that the family was donating another $10 million, unsolicited, to allow more students to participate.

And what has happened to the students who have been Mary Gates Scholars in the past? Kim Johnson-Bogart, assistant dean of undergraduate education, says the office is in the process of creating a formal tracking system to follow graduates of the program. “Informally, we know that many of them go on to top graduate school programs and that they’re very competitive in the job market,” she says. “As undergraduates, a growing number of them are also authoring or co-authoring articles that get published in refereed journals and receiving invitations to present at professional meetings.”

Pleased as its coordinators are with how the program has gone so far, they’re hoping to take it up one more level in the future by offering another kind of grant called a Venture Fellowship.

“We’re looking for a few geniuses,” Campbell quips. “Venture Fellows would be students who are so fired up with large-scale projects and so advanced in their work that we’d be willing to just turn them loose and tailor the award to what they needed.”

A similar program Campbell visited at Harvard, for example, included a student who was writing an opera, another who was translating an ancient Chinese text and a third doing work in brain physiology. Venture Fellows would be supported for a longer period of time - perhaps a year. And although no such project has as yet been funded, Campbell and Johnson-Bogart are certain it’s just a matter of time.

In the end though it all comes back to mentoring, which Campbell calls “the key to everything.” Although student initiative is important, he and other program sponsors recognize that success rests on the willingness of faculty, staff, and community leaders to invest a considerable amount of time and energy in students.

“There’s got to be somebody,” Campbell says, “telling the student, ‘Come on, you can do this. You can do more. I believe in you. You can get to the next level.’”

That’s why he and Johnson-Bogart welcome calls from faculty and staff who are interested in working with students. Sometimes, Johnson-Bogart says, the office is able to help a student find a mentor when they know of faculty and staff interest.

Over the next several weeks, University Week will feature just a few of the students who are or have been Mary Gates Scholars, along with their mentors. For further information about the program, see http://www.washington.edu/oue/students/mgendowment.html