Brenna Long’s trip to Capitol Hill drew a lot of attention from people she knows. Long, a senior conversation biology major at Illinois State University, visited Washington, D.C., in early March with junior biology major Tara Geyer and Office of Student Research Director Gina Hunter to advocate for student research.
“There were people coming up to me in the weeks leading up to the trip, including my family, telling me all these things that I need to communicate to the legislature,” Long, of Normal, said. “I was like, ‘I have a plan. I only have so much time with them. I need to share that time with my team. I can’t talk their ear off for an hour.’ It was a lot of pressure.”
Long knows all about pressure. Earlier this semester, she thought she had lost her National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded NexSTEM scholarship. Her $5,000 in scholarship funds and another $1,000 designated for professional development and conference travel she could use for the D.C. trip were temporarily frozen due to federal funding changes implemented by recent federal directives. “I have it as of now. But at the time, it was very scary.”
So when she and Geyer met March 3 with staff for U.S. Rep. Eric Sorensen and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who represent the area encompassing Illinois State’s campus, Long had plenty to talk about.
“That’s the bulk of what I discussed with them because I had scholarships that were funded by the NSF that were pulled out from under me,” said Long, who is graduating in May. “I was hoping to get into grad school, and labs and universities are losing funding, so they won’t be able to accept graduate students. The USDA has frozen hiring, which is where I was hoping to look for a job.
“So it feels like a scramble. And I told them as much that. I’ve spent all this time working really hard to get to a point where, once I graduate, I have all these plans, and I think I’m on plan F now.”
“It’s a very uncertain time for research, and I think students are feeling the uncertainty that’s filtering down about funding and about the future of science in general.”
Dr. Gina Hunter
The trip was the culmination of the Students Transforming through Research (STR) Advocacy Program, a four-month professional development opportunity organized by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR). The Illinois State group was one of only two teams from Illinois and among 60 institutional teams representing 54 institutions from 22 states.
Hunter applied to the program last year. She sent a callout for student participants that was answered by Geyer and Long.
“We have a lot of undergraduate researchers, but it’s not as well known about as I feel like it should be,” Geyer, of Aurora, said. “So I was excited to do something with advocacy and undergraduate research.”
Before and during the trip, public affairs professionals working through the STR program trained the participants on how to advocate for and communicate their research so it was applicable and accessible to policymakers. They learned how to write policy briefs and op-eds, and how to communicate their research to legislative staffers, the media, and other stakeholders using nonpartisan language.
“My understanding of their research changed because they got clearer and clearer about the broader implications of their research, about how it’s important to citizens in general, and also how their own critical experience with undergraduate research was so formative and so important,” Hunter said.
Geyer has been researching songbirds for three years in Dr. Carlos Rodríguez’s Evolution of Animal Communication lab and has presented her work at the University Research Symposium. Long has been examining how cover crops affect fungal biomass under Professor of Ecology Bill Perry and participated in the School of Biological Sciences’ rainforest ecology trip to Costa Rica. They both said the STR training helped them talk to different audiences about their research.
“So obviously we care about what we’re doing, but not everyone does,” Geyer said. “So how do you explain your research in a way that it seems like it matters, that it’s applicable?”
One way was by telling their personal stories and the impact research has made on their lives. Geyer talked about losing opportunities to participate in NSF-funded summer research experiences and being worried about losing the financial aid she relies on to attend college. They wanted to show the staffers the human impact of funding cuts.
“A lot of funding that I get is from being a first-generation student and being from a low-income background,” Geyer said. “A lot of that being cut means that not only can I no longer do research. The people you’re impacting the most are people who don’t have the materials, or the funding, or the background that can make it possible for them to do this without the funding that we’re getting on a federal level. So I feel like that was a huge thing that was also brought up over and over again.”
The group said the legislative staffers gave them a half-hour each during a hectic week in Washington and were receptive to the group’s message.
“It’s a very uncertain time for research, and I think students are feeling the uncertainty that’s filtering down about funding and about the future of science in general,” Hunter said. “But the hopeful part was to see the students empowered by the experience of going to Capitol Hill and talking to these staffers. The staffers were receptive. They told us what our legislators are doing on behalf of research, like trying to maintain federal funding that has long been a bipartisan issue.”
