Intellectual Entrepreneurs

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Human biology major Justin Jefferson snaps on a pair of bright blue rubber gloves as he prepares to give an informal tour to a recent visitor at a University of Texas at Austin animal behavior research laboratory. The 20-year-old sophomore moves with ease from room to room—one minute inspecting small vials of bloodless brain tissue pulled from a freezer, and the next stroking a large, white rat in his hands—all the while explaining how he helps graduate students and faculty with their research at least 12 hours a week.

“We do many things in our lab, but our main goal is to look at gene expression in rats, and study reproduction and puberty of the rats, mainly at the molecular level,” says Jefferson, who an hour earlier was carefully measuring cellular and molecular changes in brain samples at another lab across campus.

As part of a research study on reproduction in rats, human biology major Justin Jefferson (right) collects cells for graduate student Deena Walker to observe under the microscope at an animal behavior research laboratory on campus. Walker was Jefferson’s mentor last fall when he was enrolled in the IE Pre-Graduate School Internship Program. Photo: Christina Murrey.

Anyone who talks to this confident, young scientist would find it hard to believe that he went to a high school that offered few science classes, or that he felt overwhelmed by his first year at college.

“I always felt a step behind,” says Jefferson, the oldest of four Latino children who grew up in the housing projects of east San Antonio.

The first person in his family to attend college, Jefferson says everything changed for him last fall when he discovered and enrolled in the university’s Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) Pre-Graduate School Internship, where students are encouraged to find their passions and interests, explore graduate school opportunities and learn how to think about ways to use their knowledge to make a difference.

“When I joined the program, it gave me a sense of community,” the tall, dark-haired Jefferson says, noting that unlike several of his peers who had parents who were doctors or other professionals, he didn’t have anyone he could turn to for academic advice. “Being in this lab, I feel like I belong here,” he says.

Designed to give undergraduates a taste of what graduate school is really like, the one-semester IE internship program provides students (“interns”) opportunities and credit hours to explore academic and life interests with the guidance of a mentoring faculty adviser or graduate student in their discipline.

More than 200 students have participated in the IE pre-grad program since its inception in 2003. Each year, the numbers of interns and mentors increase dramatically. Initially, the program averaged about 20 interns a semester. This spring, 93 interns representing every school or college enrolled as interns.

As an intern, Jefferson paired up with 28-year-old mentor Deena Walker (who could relate to Jefferson, she says, because she also struggled initially with her undergraduate courses after attending a rural Nebraska high school with few resources for studying science). During the internship, Jefferson and Walker met twice a week for three hours—one day talking about a scientific paper so he could start to learn the scientific process of an experiment, and the other talking about lab techniques that he would learn.

“I also learned how to build networks and relationships with professors and graduate and undergraduate students. Now, I’m up to par and can compete with anyone,” Jefferson says with obvious self-assurance.

Walker, a second-year graduate student in the Institute for Neuroscience in the College of Natural Sciences, agrees.

“You can see the building of confidence in him,” Walker says. “I don’t think that would have happened without the IE program. I don’t think he would have even gotten into a lab, because I don’t think he knew what to do or who to contact.”

By allowing him to shadow her in class and at the lab, by answering his multitude of questions and by introducing him to other graduate students, Walker has helped Jefferson realize he has what it takes to be competitive in graduate school.

She notes that Jefferson now has a realistic idea of what to expect in graduate school and what the many career options are that he can pursue with an advanced graduate degree.

“Like many people, Justin had never interacted with a doctoral student or academic. Therefore, a Ph.D. didn’t seem like a viable option,” Walker says. She notes that Jefferson had only interacted with medical doctors so he had role models that he could only associate with a career in medical science.

“Through the IE program,” she says, “Justin has been exposed to another possible career in science and now there are more options available to him in this discipline.”

This level of engagement between intern and mentor is exactly what Dr. Richard Cherwitz, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, envisioned when he created the concept of Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) in 1997 while he was an associate dean in the Office of Graduate Studies. IE is now part of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.

“Ultimately what IE tries to do—whether it’s this particular internship program or others—is to change the metaphor and model of higher education from what I call ‘apprenticeship-certification-entitlement’ to one of ‘discovery-ownership-accountability,’” Cherwitz says. “The primary mission of IE is to educate students to be citizen-scholars—individuals who creatively use their intellectual capital as a lever for social good.”

Cherwitz emphasizes that intellectual entrepreneurship, as a philosophy of education, is about how to create spaces for people to discover their personal passions and how to connect those passions with the academic and intellectual resources needed to accomplish their professional objectives.

The IE pre-grad internship gives students an “academic space” just by giving them the opportunity to discover and discuss their aspirations and explore the value of academic disciplines and the culture of graduate study, he says.

“We’re teaching them to be anthropologists of their lives and their academic disciplines,” he says.