Exposing undergraduate students to research: A Condensed Matter Physics case study

In an effort to communicate major scientific breakthroughs to a vast audience, the media tends to present brief accounts of the findings and the process towards their discovery. While this may be sufficient for the layperson, it is certainly not enough for an undergraduate student in a scientific discipline. Moreover, the media will unlikely be able to judge the relevance of different breakthroughs and more emphasis will be put in those discoveries with more captivating titles. This is particularly worrying when it comes to actual students as it utterly biases their decisions when aiming to pursue a research career. The fact that syllabi tend to leave little to no room for introducing concepts that go beyond the standard curriculum leaves this problem unsolved. With the aim of tackling these issues, we have organized a workshop where experts from various institutions delivered lectures and even performed exhibitions of the phenomena being discussed. The initiative, named Recent Advances in Condensed Matter Physics, was aimed at undergraduate Physics students in their last two years at our University. In order to assess the strategies of our learning methodology, the experiment was carried out for three consecutive academic years and feedback from students was collected in the form of homework and surveys. The results show that introducing recent research discoveries in the curricula is a complex yet profitable strategy.