The Undergraduate Apprentice Program of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), first implemented by Senior Museum Scientist Monica J. Albe in Fall, 2006, combines modest coursework with extensive hands-on experience in specimen preparation, museum curation, field work, and ultimately, research in vertebrate evolutionary biology. The goals of the program are threefold: to provide students with more complete exposure to the nature of museum-based research, to better prepare them to work as research assistants to faculty sponsored projects, and, ultimately, to make them more competitive when applying to graduate programs or professional positions. As part of this experience, students become members of an exciting, dynamic, and intellectually challenging community of leading researchers. In addition to providing significant practical experience in museum science, the program affords students an invaluable entree into the intellectual activities of a research museum.
Under the direction of the curators and scientists, the students carry out many of the day-to-day activities of the museum: data collection and management, specimen preparation, vertebrate identification, surveys and studies, collections care and management, lab analysis, and library research, to name a few. Students have been active participants in such programs as the Grinnell Resurvey and the georeferencing of localities for international networks of online museum specimen databases. During the Fall, 2007 semester, the six faculty and three staff curators in the MVZ oversaw a force of 115 undergraduate research and curatorial assistants.
In addition to the range of courses taught by MVZ curators (all of whom are members of the Berkeley faculty), students can also take the Prep Lab Class and class in Museum and Field Techniques in Vertebrate Natural History.
Students praise the program: “I love being part of the MVZ. To be working in a group of people who are all passionate about what they are researching is very cool. I feel like I am actually doing something important as I modify the Arctos database, and have to go searching through 80 year-old field notes to find some detail.”
Says MVZ Associate Director Eileen Lacey, “To the best of my knowledge, the MVZ's Undergraduate Apprentice Program is unique not only on the Berkeley campus, but also within the U.S. I know of no other university-affiliated museum that offers a similar structured, comprehensive opportunity for undergraduates to engage in museum-based research. Because the program has been developed to operate within the context of a research museum (rather than an explicitly educational setting), it requires minimal infrastructure to sustain and, hence, provides a model for undergraduate education that should be applicable to a wide range of research programs and institutions.