Kathleen N. Morgan 1 & Joanne D. Altman 2

1. Promise: Access to Expensive Resources or Restricted Populations Peril: Lack of Control Promise: High External Validity Peril: Complicated Interpersonal Politics Ways to Leverage: Track your students’ employment after graduation, and make sure that your administration knows the impact of student participation in your community research. Some Solutions: Discuss these details in advance and establish a paper trail to document them. Make sure that there is a tangible outcome to the project that is useful to your community partner; the experience should be a “win-win” for all of the partners. Kathleen N. Morgan1 & Joanne D. Altman2 1Wheaton College, Norton, MA; 2High Point University, High Point, NC The Perils and Promise of Community Partners in Undergraduate Research Conclusions: Probably the most important component to a successful research partnership with a community partner is COMMUNICATION. It may sound obvious, but we cannot stress enough how important constant contact with, and demonstrated appreciate for, your community partner will add to the success of your partnership! A box of donuts, a birthday card, similar small things can make a huge difference! The partner’s priorities change, dates get changed, staff changes, permissions change, etc.—often with no input from you or even letting you know until after the fact. Students with real world experience are more confident in their career goals and have something to talk to interviewers about that sets them apart and makes them more competitive in the job marketand in graduate school applications. Community partners are often nonprofits that may be accustomed to donations of time and expertise. That can sometimes make the ownership of any data or other materials resulting from the partnership a bit unclear. Who owns the resources that you will be making use of? The ideas brought into the project? The end product, if any? Who has control over dissemination of results? Some Solutions: Be sure any projects planned with community partners can tolerate some flexibility. Stay in constant contact with your partner; checking in regularly (even if it seems like nothing much out of the ordinary is going on) can save you LOTS of headaches down the road. Office politics within the partner organization may be complicated, and staff will sometimes try to recruit you to participate in these. Some Solutions: Be sure to communicate routinely with all parties; working through only one party looks like taking sides Don’t get drawn in! Listen sympathetically to complaints, but avoid making any responses that could be construed as an opinion. One bad experience, one less than ideal student, one failure to follow through—these things can burn a community partner forever Some Solutions: Not every student can be an effective partner in community research; choose your student partners carefully. Have your student partners sign a contract with you that lays out their responsibilities both to you and to the community partner; it makes them accountable in a way that also adds to their learning from the experience Students learning "in the field" puts contentinto context and is high impact learning. Students learn nuances about the community partner's pace, environment, and degree of feedback. These experiences can help students clarify their career goals. The data collected in applied settings also have authentic external validity in a way that lab-collected data cannot. Ways to Leverage: Collect data on where your student partners in these kinds of projects end up after graduation, to document its impact and garner university support for your efforts. A mutually beneficial relationship between a community partner and a university builds a foundation of trust and opens doors for future collaboration and student opportunities. Positive publicity for the university builds a relationship with university administration and alumni. Ways to Leverage: Take every opportunity for publicity. Take pictures, write up public relations blurbs and send them to campus PR and local news agencies. The community partner typically has resources (human clients, animal subjects, equipment, etc.) that are not available to you otherwise. Ways to Leverage: Service back to the community partner helps them realize our work is a resource to them, which helps to keep their resources available to us. Build into the project something tangible to present to the community partner. Become indispensable. ABSTRACT: Engaging in undergraduate research with community partners can be highly rewarding; the applied setting provides great external validity to one's work, and students are able to see immediately the value of the work they are doing. Community partners, however, can also pose challenges for the would-be researcher; their politics, timetables, and agendas do not always mesh well with the academic world. How might we maximize the benefits and minimize the costs? Promise: Job Opportunities/Graduate Training Peril: Ownership Peril: One Bad Apple… Promise: Improved “Town-Gown” Relationships