Suzanne Banda, a senior majoring in psychology and Spanish, was not expecting to conduct a formal research project as an undergraduate.

“At first I didn’t want to apply for a research grant because the thought of doing research scared me,” she says. “But I realized for grad school, you really do need research experience.”

Putting her fears aside, Banda, a member of the Academic Community of Excellence (ACE), applied for and received an Undergraduate Research Award through the ACE program.

Banda’s research focused on students’ motives for studying foreign languages at LMU. “I’ve always been interested in languages,” she explains. “I grew up speaking Spanish as well as English, and have studied Japanese for seven years, so I wanted to somehow use that experience in my research.”

ACE is geared toward students with strong academic records and a commitment to high educational and professional achievement. Students are admitted in their sophomore year. Steven Neal, ACE director, says the mission of the program is to cultivate exemplary undergraduate scholars for admission to graduate and professional schools.

“We have some of the most gifted collegians in ACE who are working diligently to position themselves for various graduate, law and medical programs,” Neal says.  “Many of our award recipients have credited ACE with making it possible for them to pursue a research project for the first time in their college careers.”

Students who receive Undergraduate Research Awards work with a faculty advisor over the course of a semester, and present their work at the annual ACE Research Symposium in the fall. Banda, who works as a research assistant in the psychology and Spanish departments, says she is thankful for the opportunity, which has given her a glimpse of what graduate school will be like.

“In psychology, we take a course dedicated to learning how to do research using a specific computer system and developing your own experiment. It’s one thing to learn about it in class, but to actually go out and get the data yourself is really beneficial,” she says.

“ACE helped so much, especially Steven (Neal),” Banda adds. “He’s been a real mentor. He’s really pushed me and everyone in the program to think about grad school while we’re undergraduates.”