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Interview with › MARILYN SOMMERS
Q. What is an "inquiry" course? It’s a course that gives students an opportunity to work one-to-one with a faculty member as they explore, analyze, and critique the body of knowledge in a particular area. The culmination is a scholarly paper generated by the student. Q. How would you describe the effect of this course on students? Before Penn Nursing students get to this course, they are already grounded in science and evidence based practice. What changes is that many of them go from using research as the basis for clinical practice to becoming researchers. As they experience the thrill of discovery, they realize that they can be part of the creation of new knowledge. Not only will they follow "where science leads," but they will lead the science.
Q. Is the value of this type of course limited to nursing? All undergraduates benefit from asking questions and using source documents to try to understand the state-of-the-science (or art) about a particular topic. No matter the major, for students to have a chance to build upon their foundational course work by developing an area of inquiry that is of particular interest to them is a fabulous educational strategy. They become engaged and quite innovative both with the development of their questions and with the answers they extrapolate. Q. Could you talk about some of your own research on risk-taking behaviors? Trauma is the leading cause of death in the first four decades of life, and when people survive an injury, they may have to live with a life-long disability that changes the potential for a rich and rewarding life. As a trauma nurse, I have watched many adolescents and young adults struggle with the aftermath of trauma. I feel compelled to develop and test interventions that will reduce or prevent injury in a significant way. I generally focus on individual factors that can be changed by motivating people to think about the behaviors that place them at risk for injury. Q. You spent 15 years as a nurse before turning to teaching. Why did you become a nursing professor? I returned to school for a Ph.D. so that I could learn to become an independent scientist. I hoped by developing and testing interventions I could prevent the life-changing, critical injuries that I was seeing. I also wanted to teach students the rewards of building the science behind our practice. I knew that I had many relevant clinical questions to answer, and saw that growing nursing science was exciting. I wanted to communicate that passion to students. Q. Your son Zachary is C'11. Has being a Penn parent changed your perspective on the University? I am even more aware of my responsibilities to the undergraduate students, helping meet their goals no matter what the discipline. I work with undergraduate students from the College and Engineering, as well as Nursing. I am delighted to show them the inner workings of nursing science, and I hope that they are intrigued with a scientific career. Parents send their children to Penn in part because of the experience of working with Penn faculty, so I feel a special obligation to provide that kind of experience. ---- |
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Watching
a student make the leap from learning to creating
knowledge — it's a transformation that