Nitin Sadras, Hyun Sung Jung, Jambu Jambulingam , Brett Rapponotti

From taking Engineering 125, we have learned a lot about the ethical dilemmas that engineers face in every day life. Whether it is in the classroom or in the workplace, engineering is a discipline that drives forward innovation, but it is important to take a step back and understand at what cost these advancements come. A key community that faces this dilemma is engineers conducting research on university campuses worldwide. Researchers are challenged to push concepts and thoughts into reality, and test whether certain hypothesis are feasible for real-world applications. Undergraduate students are an important population that contributes to the research efforts of a university, and our group would like to understand what ethical dilemmas undergraduates should be aware of when working in a research lab on a university campus.

Undergraduates are hungry to learn and explore their disciplines, and research is often their first experience doing relevant work in a field they enjoy. A lot of the times, they leap for opportunities that come their way, just to get some experience under their belt and hope to find even better positions in the future. However, it would be very beneficial to be cognizant of the ethical challenges one might face when starting research work. We would like to provide a set of guidelines, proposed by fellow undergraduates involved with research, to help new undergraduates understand the issues at hand. We hope to achieve this by interviewing undergraduate researchers and asking them a set of questions having to do with their first experiences with ethical challenges. Once we conduct the interviews, it is our responsibility to condense and accurately depict the views of the interviewees, in the hope to present this information in a concise manner. By producing a video collage of all of these responses, we hope that students world-wide can learn from current undergraduate researchers before they embark on this journey.

The goal of each interview is to understand the ethical issues that undergraduates encounter while doing research.  To that end, we will question our interviewees about the nature of their research, and from there, inquire about aspects of their work that are ethically questionable.  These need not be directly related to the subject matter of their research; for example, some students may have Principal Investigators that give them unreasonable amounts of work, or make them work longer hours than were initially agreed upon.  Since research positions are highly valuable to undergraduate students, they may not be inclined to question the decisions of their PI’s in order to keep their positions and move upward.  Just like in any job position where you are in someone else’s power, this can lead to an unhealthy working environment.  Another important concern for researchers is attribution of work – undergraduates often do work that is critical to research products, but may not be properly credited for their contributions.  Both of the aforementioned problems are well-known issues in academia, and we would like to know if undergraduate researchers at Cal have to deal with them, and if so, what resources are available to them to resolve them.

Some of the challenges our project requires us to solve are, firstly, finding the right interviewees whose opinions and experiences can be understood by a wide audience. We are only focusing on research in engineering, but the vast amount of research topics in engineering can lead to a very narrow scope unless we choose our interviewees appropriately. The next challenge we face is to combine all of the interviews into a concise video that flows in unison, while maintaining all of the relevant information each individual interview provided. There are no costs associated with this project, but we must pick up the pace to be able to have an effective video by the due-date.

For finding our interviewees, we were fortunate enough that we knew people who were involved in research. It’s a reflection on Berkeley that we have these connections with friends in research. One fact that was brought up when we proposed our project idea in discussion was that we had managed to interview people in varying fields of research. Although we had tried to do this, it wasn’t the main goal: different fields require different approaches to research and ethics as well. The main purpose was simply to try to gather how and what undergraduates felt about research and how and where ethics plays a role, if any, in their field or research as well as what their overseers discuss with them in terms of ethics.

We decided that a video would be the appropriate format for our civic engagement portion, since we had gathered four interview clips. Combining it together and uploading it to a popular video hosting site like YouTube would help garner some exposure. Of course, marketing the video through other social media sites and word of mouth will also help. The dialogue generated from the video, we hope, will show others how undergraduates at Berkeley go about their particular research. Hopefully, the dialogue will be able to extend to graduate students as well, and to those in charge of research who see what those working under them feel about ethics and the ethical implications of their research.

We would like to provoke some thoughts of other undergraduate researchers regarding the topics dealt in the interview such as security and fair representation of credit. We hope them to reflect these thoughts at their work place or at their future jobs facing ethical concerns. We would like to keep track of the feedback of the viewers, however this plan is realistically impossible beyond the level of checking the replies on the video hosting websites or SNS.