When the American Anthropological Association offered its Undergraduate Research Fellows program in 2019–2020, the intent was not only to obtain ethnographic insights into the college‐workforce transition for anthropology majors, but also to provide a meaningful educational experience to the participating student‐researchers. Previously (Ginsberg and Jackson, this issue), we have situated the fellowship program with reference to ethnography of higher education and native ethnography; in this paper, by contrast, we contextualize it with scholarship on high‐impact practices in undergraduate education, including research opportunities, collaborative assignments, and community‐based learning. We then present reflections from the student‐researchers themselves regarding what they learned through participation in the fellows program. In their reflections, the fellows describe a process of becoming more central members of three overlapping communities of practice: the AAA research team, their respective home departments, and the discipline of anthropology overall. We conclude by discussing reasons why anthropology is particularly well suited to provide undergraduate research opportunities, and why doing so would strengthen the discipline as well.
Unlike business, health, or engineering courses, undergraduate liberal arts programs do not point majors directly to a professional application, so students often need to creatively explore and identify professional roles and workplaces in which to use their education. Anthropology presents particular challenges: while students may enroll in economics if their institution has no undergraduate business program, or biochemistry may function as premed, there is no clear sense of what comes after an anthropology degree. In 2018, the American Anthropological Association announced a new approach to understanding this issue through its Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Currently enrolled anthropology majors worked together with faculty mentors, collaboratively across universities, to do anthropological research on the question, "how do anthropology majors approach the question of what comes after college?" The research provided practical insights and recommendations to departments, faculty members, career counseling centers, and the students themselves. This special section comprises six papers: an introduction to the project and the field sites; four analytic papers in which student researchers and faculty mentors explore the topics, "how students come to major in anthropology," "how students are changed by studying anthropology," "what anthropology majors think about their professional future," and "what resources are available to support students' college-tocareer transition"; and a reflective essay that considers the fellowship not as a research program but as a high-impact pedagogical intervention. We show that, by participating in ethnographic research, student researchers become full members of the anthropology community who can give valuable recommendations for the future of the discipline. [undergraduate research, anthropology education, career discernment]
primary areas of focus are employment trends for professional anthropologists, the availability of anthropology curricula at the pre-collegiate level, and the history of anthropology curriculum development projects. She particularly enjoys digging into the details of how curricula evolve and anthropology's in uence on present-day pedagogy.When she's not in the AAA o ce, Palmyra can be found cycling, playing board games, and petting neighborhood cats.
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