Department of Biology

THE FRESHMAN WORK PROGRAM:
LINKING STUDENT WORK AND STUDENT LEARNING
A freshmen employment program for Department of Biology

Welcome to IUPUI and the Department of Biology. We are very pleased that you have chosen to become a member of our academic community and we hope to make every aspect of your experiences here productive and enjoyable.

One of the challenges we have as an urban institution that has very limited on-campus residential opportunities for students is to create an atmosphere where students feel connected to the institution in such a way that it becomes the very center of their lives. Since you cannot “live” with us is some sense we thought that you could at least “work” with us in a number of ways outside of the usual classroom and instructional ways. In this way we hope to bring you more fully into the academic culture of higher education and, more specifically, into the work of the discipline you have chosen to study.

In order to provide work opportunities for you we have arranged through our faculty and staff plus our colleagues in the Center for Earth and Environmental Sciences (CEES) for positions in which you will be working individually or in groups with faculty and staff and their lab teams. These are introductory positions for which you need no prior experience. At the same time they are training opportunities where what you learn can lead to more sophisticated assignments as well as genuine research positions for which you can receive recognition and compensation.

Here is some additional information about the position:

Positions will pay $9.00 per hour, 10 hours per week, 15 weeks per semester (150 hours per semester for 2 semesters.
We expect that this will be your only employment. Since you are full-time students there will not be many free hours in the week and your academic success is our number one concern.
Your course work should always come first. There will be occasions when your course work and preparation for exams will be heavy and you might want to put in less time at work. Please clear this with your supervisor. Hours can be made up later when the workload diminishes.


We do wish to emphasize, and we cannot be adamant enough about this, that your primary focus here should be your academic courses.