For Arts and Sciences undergraduates, research conducted with professors is a path to knowledge and discoveries — and a key to unlocking their futures.

If you’re a student eager to conduct research — and 70 percent or more of surveyed freshmen have indicated they want just that — then Marquette University’s College of Arts and Sciences is a fertile place to engage in this often transformative experience. “Students engaged in research are making important contributions to our discoveries, our publications and our grant proposals,” says Dr. Rosemary Stuart, professor of biological sciences and associate dean for research and experiential learning. “Student researchers get to follow their own curiosity, pose questions, come up with the experimental design and research methods, and often forge new discoveries.”

Best of all, faculty mentored research is one of those high-impact, beyond-classroom experiences through which students not only build knowledge but develop and mature in ways that help them advance in life, whatever career path they choose.

Follow along as the research journeys of four students from four disciplines take them to rewarding places — and pay off in confidence and abilities they apply in situations ranging from presentations to national experts to big moments in their post-college careers and more.

(Click on an image below to learn more about each student’s research.)

In chapter 1, Ben Lamb tests himself researching a potentially cancer-fighting enzyme and presenting his results to senior members of his lab — and later finds the experience an ideal icebreaker for his medical school interviews. In chapter 2, Anthony Lanz helps a professor do something novel with a 250-year-old text — inviting community members to put aside divisions over dinner-table dialogue as envisioned by a famous Enlightenment philosopher.

In chapter 3, Noah Greenberg creates computer code that helps him make findings worthy of presenting at a national physics conference, where a giant in the field pulls him aside to share a tip. And in the final chapter, Megan Knowles takes a job as an editor after graduation and finds herself relying regularly on the lessons and skills she developed with her professor during a deep undergraduate dive into the motivations of fellow students.

The story continues as undergraduate research enriches learning and pays dividends in almost as many ways as there are students in the college, which happens to be Marquette’s largest. A new program draws high-achieving students to Marquette and grooms them for a freshman-year match with a leading faculty researcher, paving the way potentially for high-impact academic experiences such as Fulbright Fellowships as juniors and seniors.

And hear from enthusiastic alumni — “the Key Holders” — who say undergraduate research was a springboard that propelled them toward reaching their career aspirations.

Adapted from the debut issue of A&S, the annual magazine of Marquette’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences. Read the entire issue.