When they participate in research, students carry out a type of detective work that involves gathering evidence and hypothesizing to explain the mechanisms that regulate certain fundamental processes, such as apoptosis. Experimental results can affect hypotheses by confirming them, extending them, modifying them, or rejecting them. Learning is intense when one is doing research. In the pursuit of primary data, one acquires skills that cannot be found in books, including time-management techniques and the ability to think quickly and solve difficult problems. Acquiring these skills encourages faculty-student interaction, stimulates new scholarship, and prepares students to better adapt to workplace demands.
Research breaks down the divisions between students and teachers, and between academic disciplines.
Most of all, because students are working closely with faculty members, they have ongoing opportunities for regular advising and mentoring. Students who are engaged in research integrate previous science courses that they have taken. They begin to realize that what they learned in a genetics course is very applicable to a vertebrate embryology course. The skills learned in other courses are brought to bear in producing a theoretically grounded piece of empirical research. By carefully analyzing how data are presented in scientific publications, or by failing repeatedly before successfully executing a molecular biology technique, students learn how to ask questions and to put facts in context.