“The next eight weeks are all about you! Are you ready for it?” José Madera asked 32 rising sophomores, with the enthusiasm of a game show host. The PowerPoint headline, 2025 LASER Program Kickoff, was projected in all caps on the uncoiled screen behind him.
As the head of the STEM Scholars Initiative, Madera oversees the Letters & Science Summer of Excellence in Research (LASER) program. These 32 “ready-for-it” students were selected from a competitive pool of more than 90 applicants. Funded primarily by private supporters, LASER is a uniquely holistic research opportunity for early undergraduates in STEM, designed to make research more accessible. Students are provided with housing, meals and compensation during an eight-week research mentorship. Since its inception five years ago, the program has grown from three students to more than 30.
“The LASER project takes care of all the things that sometimes can get into the way of doing research over the summer, and it provides entry points,” says Assistant Professor of Geoscience Marianne Haseloff, one of the faculty mentors working with a LASER student this summer. “Having structure in the University — where you can apply to and find different projects, talk to different potential mentors — that makes it easier for students who might not necessarily know what they want to do. It gives them the confidence to approach somebody or know how it actually works to get involved. Having that initial steppingstone is sometimes all we need to start something completely new.”
Haseloff leads the glaciology group in the Department of Geoscience, which investigates glacier and ice sheet dynamics.
“I saw the geoscience glacier research project, and I just thought, ‘Glaciers are really cool.’ I mean, literally, they’re quite cool,” says Bethany Jarvis, a rising sophomore from Wisconsin Dells double majoring in computer sciences and data science.
In the less literal sense, the cool thing about research is that it’s “not always a straightforward path.” Those words came from Eric M. Wilcots, the Dean of the College of Letters & Science and Mary C. Jacoby Professor of Astronomy, in what he called a “pep talk” rather than a “speech.”
“In the course of doing research, you could learn something new that sends you off in a whole different direction because it is that fascinating,” he adds.
The LASER program stands out for the way it fosters inroads, confidence and learning through experience (and mistake-making).
“This has really taught me a lot about asking for help from my mentor and learning how to fail, because it’s been so new to me and all of the other students,” Jarvis says after her first five weeks on the project. “Before the LASER program, I knew what research was and that I was interested, but I had no idea really what goes on in the labs. I thought people go in there for like 20 days and come out with a paper. So, this experience has been extremely helpful in making that process more attainable to me, teaching me what that is and what goes into it, and helping me to just have this path open.”
Haseloff notes that real, hands-on research and applying the scientific process are quite different from learning in a classroom, where there is often a predetermined answer.
“When you do science, you are the first one to come up with that answer,” she says. “That’s very intimidating as a project, but if you can think about it yourself and come up with your own unique way of solving, it builds critical thinking, it builds confidence, it gives you a completely different understanding of what science actually is. I think that's one of the most valuable things that students can take out of LASER: seeing their knowledge in action.”
Jarvis has been interested in graphs and data science since the ninth grade. She just loved seeing the “little, funny trends in data.” Her affinity is now geared toward making her own graphs from a worldwide data set of mountain glaciers. Apparently, some of these glaciers (called “surging glaciers”) can move extremely fast — for a glacier, that means 50-100 meters per year — for a short period of time and will then move slowly for a longer period. Mostly looking at Svalbard, a vast region between Norway and the North Pole, Jarvis is trying to detect this cyclical behavior from satellite data and learn more about the structure of these events.
Halfway through the program, she can describe how meltwater will get trapped as it trickles down into the glacier, forming immense water pressure and forcing the glacier to move forward to release all that water.
With Madera-level enthusiasm, Jarvis gushes about her first mentor and research experience. She, and her 31 cohorts, have all learned a lot and are extremely grateful.
“Being able to use my major in an actual, real-life scenario instead of just class has really reinforced how much I love it and that computer sciences and data science are what I want to do,” Jarvis says. “It’s been really helpful, and it’s reinforced my choice of UW–Madison that they’re willing to give me this whole research program.”