When senior student Adina Kurzban decided to explore philosophy research through Honors in the Major, Harry Brighouse was the natural fit as her mentor. Brighouse, the Mildred Fish Harnack Professor of Philosophy and Carol Dickson Bascom Professor of the Humanities, has been recognized for his impressive scholarship, but Kurzban says that it was her experience in his classroom that made the difference.
“I had Harry freshman year, and that was my first philosophy class here. I bothered him a lot and would ask a lot of questions in office hours,” Kurzban says. “After a second class from Brighouse, I felt like Harry knew me better than my other professors.”
Brighouse agrees.
“I invest a lot of time and energy into getting to know my students in order to teach them well,” he says. “By the time Adina finished her freshman year, I knew her pretty well intellectually, understood how her mind works and I understood what she could do.”
For Kurzban, that level of understanding means senior-thesis mentorship that is specific and tailored to her.
“She is trying to work out what her research question is, and I’m trying to help her discover what her question is,” Brighouse says. “Compared to shorter classroom interactions when I’m the one assigning philosophy problems, we get a whole year to figure out what the problems are that she really wants to address and then figure out how to address them. I don’t already have the answers to those things in my head.”
The advantages go Brighouse’s way, too.
“There is another benefit to that, which is that if I need something, I know who to go to because I already know them quite well,” he says. “At any given time, there are 10 or 15 students on the campus who I know really very well intellectually.”
Brighouse remembers a time when he was struggling with a project on a tight deadline, and he was able to hire a sophomore student who had been in his First-Year Interest Group to be his research assistant. She stepped up in a big way and helped usher the project to the finish line, eventually earning her a spot as a co-author on the paper.
“I knew she had a skillset that could basically save me,” Brighouse says. “She was able to look through lots of data that I couldn’t. Literally, I couldn’t find the data that she was able to find. I had a really hard deadline, and I knew that she could consume a lot of written material very fast and organize it conceptually in roughly the ways that I would. In the end, it was a co-authored paper, because she’d already done so much of the thinking work by the time it got to us working it through together.”
“A bottom-line thing that faculty get out of mentoring undergraduate research is more career satisfaction and opportunities to do meaningful things outside the classroom in informal learning settings,” says Alfonso Morales, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Urban and Regional Planning. “The informal learning that we make possible through these relationships with students — that doesn’t show up significantly in our teaching metrics — but it could be the most important learning that we provide students. It’s arguably just as important as any other classes.”
Morales has nurtured many students, including through the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (URS) and the LASER Program, a year-long multidisciplinary introduction to research for first-year students. Nolan Hegge is one of the stand-out Letters & Science students who started as a freshman doing basic tasks, helping with data entry and asking questions. Now, Hegge is in his fourth year in Morales’ lab and is a URS Fellow and a Hilldale Fellow, leading other undergraduate students.
For Hegge, the research experiences he had as a freshman changed his college path. He wanted to go into medicine, because he felt it was the most direct way to help people. But working with Morales in the Kaufman Lab, a research lab through the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture dedicated to the study and design of food systems and marketplaces, he discovered new possibilities.
“In high school I was doing that whole track like volunteering in medicine and the Red Cross, leading to me applying with neurobiology to be pre-med,” says Hegge. “In my first semester I took a programming class, and I really liked it, but I still didn’t see the throughline of where the application lies. I had gotten into the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, so I was also starting the semester there. After a few weeks I learned about Alfonso’s work in the Kaufman Lab. I thought, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ This was something where I could use programming skills, but I also had this application where I’m working with the community. In food systems you see people light up — there’s a community side, a health side and tons of benefits. I could see them in person, and there’s this deep sense of community. Through URS I could’ve joined a pre-med lab, which would have been great, but I decided to take a chance.”
URS broadens the discovery and exploration that is possible at the beginning of a student’s career. Even though Hegge started as pre-med, he ended up triple majoring with data science, cartography and environmental studies with a focus on food systems and agriculture.
“Students take a risk,” Morales says. “They look at the material that is presented to them in URS — all of our little advertisements about who we’d like to work with — and they take a risk. They may not totally see it as a risk, but they do see it as a choice, and we make a choice to work with them.”
Morales emphasizes the importance for research leaders and faculty members to develop systems that work for the lab and the students. One process includes involving students in recruitment at the end of their research cycle.
“We’ve shifted back to student leadership, and they’re remarkable,” Morales says. “These interactions can be so delightful and so meaningful to the student. When the faculty member stops and thinks about how meaningful it is to them, it helps us shift back and remember how we communicate to the community through our students. I would really encourage my colleagues to take this up and to make more of themselves available for this sort of informal learning. It’ll pay off for them.”
Research at the Rotunda Photo Caption: Adina Kurzban and Nolan Hegge were among six student researchers who, with their faculty mentors, represented UW–Madison at the 2026 Research in the Rotunda event at the Wisconsin State Capitol. (Photo by Capitol Photographers, Joe Koshollek and Anna Ihland)
Learn More about becoming a URS mentor at urs.ls.wisc.edu/project. Learn more about teaching a First-Year Interest Group at figs.wisc.edu/instructors.