These projects fully allow our undergraduate students the opportunity to actively engage in current scientific research. We are proud that more than a hundred students have been  involved in the research program at Coe College. Our success is measured by that of our students. Virtually all (about 80 %) of the graduates from the program have moved on to quality graduate schools in either physics, materials science or an allied science or mathematics. Recent graduates have gone to graduate school at: Harvard, Georgia Tech, MIT, Lehigh, UCLA, Florida State, Stanford, Colorado State, Northwestern, Washington University (St. Louis), Iowa State University, University of Illinois, Vanderbilt University, Brown University, Colorado School of Mines, State University of New York at Stonybrook, Kansas State University, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and others. Since the project has begun, a dozen of our physics research students have also elected to spend a semester doing research through our "Oak Ridge Science Semester" offered by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) consortium. As a direct result of this research students have participated in other off-campus research programs including stints at University of Warwick (UK), University of Manitoba (Canada), University of Reading (UK), University of Tsukuba (Japan), Fudan University (China), Sojo University (Japan), andthe Rutherfor-Applton Lab (UK). The graduates of this research program have gone on to a number of distinguished careers at Lucent Technologies, Chrysler, Motorola, Andersen Consulting, Argonne National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, Eaton Electronics, Rockwell, NASA, Applied Materials, National Semiconductor, Argonne National Lab, many Fortune 500 companies, several universities and colleges, and many more places. They are wonderfully successful in a diverse range of jobs.
 Training students to learn to do research is, by design, the single most important aspect of the research work. They design experiments and build necessary apparatus. For example, we have, in house, designed and built two high speed roller-quenchers (up to 5500 RPM with a variable gap between the rollers which is reproducible in steps of 0.5 microns. The resulting cooling rate exceeds 105,000 oC/s). We also completely redesigned and built our own "third generation" set of five dry-boxes which use either continuous dry gas flow bottled dry nitrogen, or boil-off from liquid nitrogen. Students learn to make reliable measurements, each student often studies more than 100 samples on their own in order to learn how to make samples, property measurements, and structure observations that are correct. Each new student is trained by both experienced students and faculty. Typically, students participate two or three years in our research groups (this is a very unusual aspect of our research effort which emphasizes a thorough immersion in research throughout an undergraduate's career). Since this project is both flourishing and multidisciplinary , the College's best students are attracted to it. Thus, besides physics majors, we have worked with students of allied areas including chemistry, computer science and mathematics. |
