The annual Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) took place Monday, and I was lucky enough to be selected to participate.

My project involved infusing my Indigenous Language, Snchitsu’umshtsn, or Coeur d’Alene Salish, into a children’s book.

What I noticed to be lacking from the submissions was the “Creative Activities” part of SURCA. As an artist, I am always looking for other creative minds. In the future, it would be great to see artistic submissions rival those of the hard sciences.

Diversity was lacking in not only the types of submissions but also in the racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds of the participants. There were only a handful of cultural projects, and few, if any, were recognized come award time.

My primary grievance is how WSU, which sits on a land grant, can claim to be inclusive and provide new knowledge when many students who actually presented new knowledge were not up on stage collecting undergraduate research awards.

Perhaps I am being too picky because I didn’t win, but there were other students with insanely better projects than mine, yet they weren’t recognized either.

I would like to see SURCA add another category to honor indigenous and cultural studies from all corners of the world beyond what they offer in the humanities and social sciences categories.

This university sits on Indigenous land … it’s really the least they could do.

The values of SURCA are endless: learning to speak in front of people, being social in an academic setting, learning how to manage time, describing your work and getting practice with answering highly specific questions.

All of these skills come into play in the real world, and can be used to get a job, to add to your master’s or doctorate applications, to learn to communicate with different groups of people, to secure grant money and even to defend why you deserve to get a raise or a promotion.

Many students, like myself, often feel like schoolwork production factories, and it’s disappointing when good work goes unnoticed. Or worse yet, the soul-crushing reality that you spent ten hours on a paper only to have it graded lower than a paper that only took two.

SURCA, in some ways, is a chance to right some of those ‘wrongs’ and for students to present the projects they are working on which may go unnoticed otherwise.

Many graduate programs across the nation and outside of the United States prefer undergraduates to have some kind of “research experience.” Like many schools, WSU doesn’t offer a research course in all disciplines. Many students who would love to do research can’t because they don’t have time, or worse yet, the professors don’t have time, resources, and attention to devote to another project.

Ever since I transferred to WSU in 2014, I have been trying to get into undergraduate research. Many professors either turned me down or simply didn’t reply to my requests. For transfer students, this sets us up at a complete disadvantage because we don’t have the same access to professors as other undergraduates.

Perhaps, a pipeline needs to be created for transfer students that want to pursue undergraduate research. I found it difficult to get anything off the ground because I didn’t know any of the professors.

I still managed to get a project for SURCA, but my mentor wasn’t even at WSU; he was from the University of Idaho, because no one at WSU would have supported such a project.

Personally, I think WSU should offer undergraduate research as a required course on its own.

Students should be allowed to pick any subject they want as long as it is academically founded. Undergraduate studies are the only time students have an opportunity to explore the subjects they want. Masters and doctorates often narrow a focus and are, by and large, even less creative.

Overall, with a few changes and recognition for Indigenous studies, I think SURCA could be the event it strives to be — inclusive, providing new knowledge, and part of a global research community.