Welcome to Inquiry ‘07
Welcome to the third issue of Inquiry, the online undergraduate research journal of the University of New Hampshire.
Inquiry was created to support the broader academic mission of UNH as a research and public service university. It offers undergraduate researchers in all disciplines the opportunity to communicate their experiences and results to general as well as academic audiences—the final and very important step in the research process.
As we hoped, this third issue is greatly expanded in content and staff. Here you can read about subjects as varied as migration in China, nutrient concentration in egg yolks, and musical creativity in children. You will travel from South America to the Sahara to Iceland and to many places in between. You will join the students in their research as they hunt for toads, investigate ruins, interview family members, pursue library sources, and analyze tons of data.
Ten student editors took advantage of the chance to learn valuable editing skills in a hands-on experience. Assisted by four staff editors, they worked with student authors through the long revision process necessary to make specialized knowledge understandable and interesting to a general audience. (See Editorial Staff) They also interviewed authors and mentors, wrote biographies and feature articles, and proofread each others’ revisions. Work began fall semester and continued right up to April; drafts of articles flew back and forth, and emails multiplied. This was all extra, non-credit work for authors and editors, but they carried on with the knowledge that the results of their work were going out on the worldwide Web.
This academic year we were happy to confirm that, indeed, the world is reading Inquiry! Through the new Contact the Author feature, readers requested more information from several 2006 authors about their data and results; one author was asked to speak to a class. An Inquiry ‘05 author found his research on athletes’ use of eye black referred to in a front page article in the New York Times. Recently, Inquiry was nominated to be included in the databases indexed by EBSCOHost, a resource offered by many libraries including the UNH Dimond Library.
We hope you will find the undergraduate research described in this and previous issues of Inquiry interesting and informative. We also hope you will hear the voices of the student authors and editors and share their excitement and enthusiasm for the new worlds they are exploring. We would be pleased to hear from you in a letter (see Responses) or through the Contact the Author link at the end of each article.
—Donna Brown, Director of Undergraduate Research
