Her fond memories of work as an undergraduate researcher played an important role in her decision to leave her Wall Street programming job and return to Columbia as a graduate student. Tselepis' experience is a good example of how undergraduate research work can influence career choices. For some, it is a litmus test for an entry into academic life. Instead of looking for the knowledge we do have, he says, research forces students to look for knowledge we don't have. It's a process of looking for holes and trying to plug them, which is completely different from the classroom experience of learning what others already know.
Undergraduate research can help professors as well as students.
Obviously, professors are happy when undergraduates do research that makes a positive contribution to a project, but this is only the most obvious of the benefits faculty derive from the arrangement. Klavans appreciates the outside perspectives that a student taking courses in diverse areas can bring to her projects. It doesn't always work out that way. Undergraduate research can go badly for as many different reasons as there are students and professors. Sometimes it's a matter of confused expectations on the part of the professor or the student, or both.