Research Assistants

Honors College research assistants: responsible Honors students ready to work alongside you in whatever capacity your research agenda requires—and at no cost to you, your department, or your college. 

The resources are readily available—funding through University scholarship awards, and talent through the Honors College—to help you more effectively and efficiently accomplish your research goals.   LSU’s research-intensive environment is brimming with research projects: in Accounting, Theater, Veterinary Medicine, Petroleum Engineering, Mathematics, French Studies… everywhere.  High-achieving, hard-working, responsible Honors students are likewise majoring in disciplines across the spectrum, and are eager for the opportunity to participate in creating knowledge in their field.

Chancellor’s Student Aid

Nearly all Honors students are recipients of Chancellor’s Student Aid, an award package that allows students the opportunity to work as paid research assistants-- at no cost to the department or a faculty member’s research program.  This arrangement will not only benefit the faculty member’s research program and give the student hands-on experience in the discipline, but ideally the mentor/student relationship will also develop into a Thesis Director/student relationship as the student pursues College Honors, utilizing the research experience as a basis for an Honors Thesis Project.

When you have found a particular student with whom you’d like to work (or students, as the case may be), the student may then be assigned to your research program by the Office of Student Aid and Scholarships (by updating the student’s CSA appointment status to the position of  Research Assistant, with you as the contact).  If you have a departmental staff member who coordinates student workers, this person will be able to easily make the arrangements.  If not, then the student will need to go to the Office of Student Aid and request to be assigned to you as a Research Assistant.  A memo of support will be useful in this process. 

Chancellor’s Future Leaders in Research

An Honors College faculty member can also give top incoming LSU Honors students a premier undergraduate research experience by becoming a Chancellor’s Future Leaders in Research (CFLR) mentor.  Each fall the University’s most promising incoming Honors students begin assisting professors in research throughout campus, initiating a four-year research relationship that can culminate in an Honors Thesis project, the hallmark of the Honors experience, and the preeminent example of undergraduate research scholarship at LSU. 

The CFLR scholarship research program allows our most promising Honors students the opportunity to work alongside our top research faculty in all disciplines.  By mentoring one or more of the University’s most promising students in the research methods of your field, and guiding the student through the process of the Honors Thesis project, you can ensure these students have the finest undergraduate research experience available anywhere, well on their way to being leaders in research wherever they may go.

Any questions about the CFLR program should be addressed to Holly Carruth at 578-5833, hcarruth@lsu.edu.  More information is available at www.research.lsu.edu.