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Editor’s notes
This has been another difficult year in a string of difficult years, yet Western Oregon University students still manage to produce high-quality research. The articles from year’s PURE Insights are especially diverse in topic. We are showcasing not only poetry, but also identifying bodies, animal/human communication, and caregiver attitudes.
Undergraduate Research is important to students because it not only gives them experience with the nuts and bolts of doing research–library searchers, laboratory set up, analytical skills–but also gives our students the skills to think with clarity and precision.
The more exposure our students have to doing their own research, the more they will understand what “doing your own research” actually means. It does not mean going to your favorite news site and reading the headlines that make you feel vindicated. Nor does it mean reading the comments section of your favorite YouTuber. It absolutely does not mean taking the word of a single authority figure.
Research means looking over many diverse sources that disagree with one another and wrestling with their dichotomies. Research means performing experiments that are ethical, well-designed, and can be replicated. Research means writing up results in a way that the community can understand what you’ve discovered. People who can do this kind of research have the skills to help all of us make sense of this world.
Research skills are critical thinking skills which are scientific thinking skills. These are skills that are essential to making and keeping our country great. However, whether people will continue to have the opportunities to do research in the future is uncertain because government grants are uncertain. All researchers will be vying for fewer funds, and many have already felt the squeeze. But we need more people who can do the research, not fewer. By not funding research in the United States, we risk losing our best minds who will seek other places to do their studies.
And that won’t make us great at all.
Write or call your congressperson and senator and tell them to fight the cuts to government research grants. We all need these young minds (and the more experienced ones, too) to be able to find the answers to the questions that affect our lives. Otherwise, we lose.
— Maren Anderson, June 30, 2025
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MANAGING EDITOR
Maren Bradley Anderson
EDITOR
Samantha Morgan
REVIEWERS
Brooke Dolenc-Nott
Melissa Cannon
Misty Weitzel
Blue Wonhof
Editorial Support Staff
Stewart Baker
Submission Management Architect
Camila Gabaldón-Winningham
PURE Student Workers
Jeneba Diane King
Floris Ledesma
Jose Francisco Aguilar Rojas
Sophia Sides