Welcome to the Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities (URSCA) at Allegheny College. Allegheny College has a rich tradition of undergraduate research that dates back to the college’s founding in 1815. The mission of the URSCA Office is to promote student research, organize on-campus presentations of students projects, and provide information and support to students who present their projects off-campus.
URSCA at Allegheny
“The nature of senior projects are wildly different across the disciplines but as a process all of them involve something rare in this world: independent inquiry. The same can apply, beautifully, to collaborative student/faculty summer research. It is a kind of invitation to students our country’s educational systems almost never give: dear student, find a subject, an issue, a problem that intrigues or bothers you, dig into it and say something about it that’s both credible and new. The floor is yours. In fact, defining what the floor is may be yours as well. Now that’s hard.” – Professor Ben Slote, Allegheny College (during the 2022 Scholars Symposium Keynote Address).
Student research, scholarship, and creative activities take on many different flavors at Allegheny College. Whether it’s fieldwork in Alaska or a community art project, Allegheny students put theory into practice under the guidance of faculty and staff mentors through research, conference presentations, co-authored articles, and faculty-led study tours. Research, scholarship, and creative activities push students to engage a discipline or field as an active participant. Students contribute to the knowledge and understanding of their area of interest through student-faculty collaborations or independent work. URSCA lets students take what they are learning at Allegheny and apply it in new contexts and for new purposes.
At Allegheny, there’s no graduate school buffer between undergraduates and some of the leading scholars in their fields. Allegheny students don’t have to wait behind graduate students for research positions on faculty-led projects. Faculty members in all disciplines actively engage students as research collaborators—and mentor students as they pursue their own independent research pursuits. In the National Survey of Student Engagement, responses by college seniors placed Allegheny within the top 10 percent in the U.S. for close student-faculty interaction.
Check out some of the videos below that highlight some recent Senior Comp Stories.