A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.758.3849. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: Oct. 11 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, student correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Nick Young, photographer; Layout by Publications
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Collin students sharpen competitive edge in Center for Advanced Studies in Math & Natural Sciences
By Stephanie Hall, Student Correspondent
 An elite group of students have taken a rare opportunity to enhance their academic prowess by enrolling in Center for Advanced Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences (CASMNS) courses early this semester at Collin.
“This is an opportunity that will give these students a real competitive edge,” said Dr. Nelson Rich, director of the CASMNS program as well as a biology professor.
To be eligible for the CASMNS program, a student must be majoring in mathematics or natural sciences, must enroll in CASMNS eligible courses, must maintain a 3.0 grade point average, and must be interviewed by a CASMNS faculty member.
“CASMNS students are highly motivated students who want to pursue their graduate degrees or pursue careers rich in mathematics or natural sciences,” Rich said.
The program allows students who are enrolled in certain math and science courses to participate in a variety of undergraduate research activities. These students have developed research proposals, presented those research proposals and then implemented the research projects, according to Rich.
“The design of the program is such that a student has to work with at least three faculty members on a project, so they will have a support team of faculty for mentoring and guidance,” Rich said.
That support team will consist usually of the professor of the course the student is enrolled plus a professor who may a researching in an area relevant to that course, and the one additional faculty member may just be a supporting member who might be from a different discipline all together, said Rich. The students who are successful at the end of the semester will receive a myriad of benefits, he said.
“First of all, these CASMNS students will have gained valuable experience,” Rich said. “A lot of these experiences are similar to experiences of students who are beginning their master’s program.
“It’s important that people understand that there is a growing emphasis on getting students in the math and sciences engaged in research activities before they become advanced students."
The reason why is that students who begin advanced studies will already know how to collect data, develop extensive proposals where they have to develop an idea and also put together a budget, and propose it to a group who will then analyze their proposal and give them feedback, he said.
“The students involved with CASMNS will have all this knowledge under their belts,” he said
The CASMNS program prepares math and science students with the tools necessary to be a relevant part of research projects.
“It allows for a lot of communication and mentoring to be done between the faculty who have extensive experience with researching and the students who have just begun,” said Rich. “It makes the students more experienced as math and science students by allowing them to solve real world science and math problems.”
The program leads to an environment that students cannot find in a normal classroom setting.
“You just won’t find that kind of one-on-one, or small group-type interaction, with that level of scholarly investment, that you would get for signing up for CASMNS,” Rich said. “Not to diminish the importance of the course, but CASMNS takes the course above and beyond that.”
Another, more tangible benefit for signing up for CASMNS courses is the special designation on the students’ transcripts.
“When successful CASMNS students get their course grade on their transcripts, they also put advanced studies or something like that to indicate that this is something extra that they accomplished,” said Rich. “If they are honors students, the honors program also has an agreement with us so that our students who complete CASMNS contracts are also eligible for honors credit, if they meet the eligibility requirements for the honors program.”
The tangible benefits also continue beyond the day the students graduate from college, said Rich.
“On their future resumes, they will have a distinct heading: undergraduate research.”
The CASMNS program is very unique from other community college research programs, Rich said. “In fact, I don’t know of any other community college doing this. I know that there are faculty members at other community colleges in the math and sciences that sometimes do research, and sometimes they may involve students, but I don’t know of a deliberate effort of this scale going on anywhere.” It is important for students, especially math and science students, to get as much experience as possible, Rich said.
“Students who are pursuing degrees in competitive fields like the medical field and the dental field need a competitive edge to compete with everyone else pursuing those fields,” he said. “CASMNS is the first step to increasing that competitive edge.”
For more information, visit the CASMNS website at http://www.ccccd.edu/casmns/index.htm .
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