More Than Just A Journal
History is by far the most important factor in understanding the context of a situation. History is so important that without it researchers would be conducting research in a vacuum, void of all the necessary goals and vision needed to understand how it will either have an academic or industrial impact. Quite frankly, the buck does not stop there. Without the art of the graphic designer, the keenness of the editor, and the logic of the webmaster, research of the 21st century would not leave the lab.
I transferred to the University of Maryland (UMD) at the beginning of the fall semester of 2018. I came from another Maryland institution with a strong focus on undergraduate education and student research (if you need another hint it sits within the other beltway in our state). It was very easy to spark a conversation with almost anyone on that campus about their academic interests, lab work, and desire to head to graduate school. When I came to UMD, I immediately felt the same excitement from students around their majors and research. However, what I did not find was the same clear framework for students to get engaged with research and find those opportunities. It would be unfair to not mention that UMD has its fair share of phenomenal programs such as The First-Year Innovation & Research Experience (FIRE), Gemstone Honors Program, Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research, amongst a couple of others. What is missing, unfortunately, is the access to such programs by a large portion of students interested in research — especially transfer students like me.
With the goal of democratizing the hidden culture of undergraduate research at UMD, I began my pursuit.
When I was at UMBC (I hope you guessed right) I had the intention to join the UMBC Review, the institution’s undergraduate research journal. So, when I moved south on I-95 it was only natural for me to look for a similar organization to become a part of. What I found was indeed a strong collection of student publications, but no interdisciplinary journal, not to mention one that would advocate for students wishing to do research on campus. We are privileged to have discipline focused journals such as Unbound, for creative arts, Janus, for history, Stylus, for literature and art, Roshangar, for Persian Studies, The Paper Shell Review, for literary topics, and also the newly founded El Foro, for Latin American studies. However, how can a large public state university listed in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a R1 Doctoral University (a university with very high research activity) not have a discipline-agnostic campus-wide undergraduate research journal? Well, the response to that question is in itself a story.
In 2009, a group of freshmen (surprising, right?) came together to start an undergraduate research journal at UMD based off The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal model, they called it Scientific Terrapin. Most of them were life sciences majors so they hosted their work under the College of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, the same college that has supported the new SciTerp team as we’ve worked to bring back this journal and more. The harrowing fate of the journal came in 2013, after 4 years of spectacular work, when the journal could no longer sustain the amount of work needed to keep such a pillar standing.
So, we used to have a journal. I learned this accidentally a couple of months after I found their old website (which we’ve updated) by talking with their faculty advisor and a former editor. I could not sit back and watch.
With that, I wholeheartedly welcome you to Scientific Terrapin.
We are a premier undergraduate research journal at the University of Maryland that will run an academic journal for student manuscripts and research, this Medium publication as a digital platform for undergraduate researchers, and host events to promote the student publishing connectedness and research advocacy our campus so dearly deserves.
