Learning 2 Lead Leading 2 Learn

I work at a large, research-intensive university. Undergraduate research experiences are at the heart of what we do and how students learn.

A recent article (Johnson and Rifenburg, 2025) draws specific attention to the benefits that meaningful undergraduate research experiences play in helping students prepare for their future careers. With increasing focus on the role universities play in facilitating career preparedness (Kenny et al., 2025), this is great news! 

How can universities help connect students’ skill development through undergraduate research to their workplace and career preparedness?  

Johnson and Rifenburg (2025) suggest that mentoring and metacognition hold the key. Mentors can help students engage in skills articulation by designing activities that require them to reflect on the professional skills they develop through undergraduate research projects, including how these skills translate to workplace contexts.

Critical reflection is a key component of all experiential learning activities, but it’s often overlooked.  Structured metacognitive strategies that encourage thoughtful and ongoing reflection on how students prepare for, engage in and will apply what they learned through their undergraduate research experiences are great ways to encourage critical reflection. 

What’s critical to facilitating critical reflection? It must be intentionally and progressively structured as a key component to student’s engagement in undergraduate research.  I’ve adapted some reflective questions from Johnson and Rifenburg (2025) below:

• Planning: What specific aspects of this research experience excite me most?  How might that inform my future work experiences and interests? What do I hope to discover about myself as a learner and future employee? What would success look like for me in this experience, academically, personally and professionally?  What fears or concerns do I have about this experience, and how might I address them?
• Engaging: What research approaches or skills am I becoming more confident with? Which ones are still challenging me? How am I collaborating with my mentors and peers? What is this teaching me about professional/workplace relationships and interactions? How is this experience changing my perspective on problem-solving and critical thinking? How am I managing my time and priorities? What strategies are working best? What could I improve upon?
• Looking Back: What surprised me most about this research experience? How has my understanding of this field and potential career paths evolved? How would I articulate the value of my research contributions or this experience to someone outside of my field? What professional networks or connections have I developed? How might I maintain them? What key learning or experiences will transfer to other work environments? What would I do differently in a future research or work experience based on what I learned?

Any of these questions could be adapted. The key is to encourage students to think beyond the research and technical skills they are gaining to consider the broader transferable skills that could apply across different career paths – resilience, adaptability, ethical reasoning, social responsibility, time management, collaboration, communication, strategic thinking, leadership, project management, and so many more! These metacognitive prompts can help bridge the gap, making their learning and growth more intentional and visible. 

Interested in learning more about designing high-quality undergraduate research and experiential learning experiences? In partnership with colleagues at UCalgary (Flanagan et al., 2025), we conceptualized the A.I.R. Framework for high quality experiential learning:

• A – Authentic Experiences that are meaningful, relevant and complex.
• I – Intentionally Designed experiences that are integrated and structured as part of the curriculum.
• R – Reflection that is ongoing, continuous and designed to challenge students to unpack their assumptions, perspectives and learning. 

How will you help students see, experience, and communicate the link between their undergraduate research experiences and their future careers?

References:

Flanagan, K., Stowe, L., Martineau, C., Kenny, N., and Kaipainen, E. (2024). The land and A.I.R.: Revisioning experiential learning on a Canadian campus. Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 7(3). https://journals.calstate.edu/elthe/article/view/4149 

Johnson, K., & Rifenburg, J. M. (2025). Undergraduate Research: A High-Impact Preprofessional Practice. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 57(3), 21–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2025.2496114

Kenny, N., Arshad, M. A., Biswas, S., Carter, J., Dyjur, P., Flanagan, K., Grant, K. A., Kaipainen, E., Martineau, C., Mason, D., Miller, S., Norman, D., Smith, E. E., Stowe, L., & Usman, F. (2025). Shifts and Transformation in Canadian Postsecondary Teaching and Learning: Views from Teaching and Learning Centre Leaders. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary. https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/49576