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“If no one's ever taught you how to do it, it can seem like this big, major, scary thing, right?”

Brittney Meyer, professor of pharmacy practice in the College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions at South Dakota State University, recently received an Excellence in Honors Mentorship Award from the Van D. and Barbara B. Fishback Honors College.

A key reason she earned the award was her work in helping to demystify for students the “big, major, scary thing” called research.

According to Meyer, the college has a significant number of students in the honors program. In order to fully graduate with honors, these students must complete a culminating capstone project, which, for most pharmacy students, involves independent research.

“Oftentimes, that’s the one last thing they haven’t checked off their list,” she said. “And sometimes they think, ‘I don’t want to do research. I don’t know how to do research.’”

Meyer faced this herself and credits her own experiences being mentored in research with her desire to mentor students in research now.

“When determining what to do after graduation with my Pharm.D., I was thinking about completing a residency. As a resident, you have to do research. I almost didn’t do a residency because I was so fearful of having to do a research project because I didn’t know how to do it. But my mentors assured me that I wasn’t alone. I would have preceptors and mentors to walk me through the process,” she said.

“And that’s how I see myself now for the undergrads. I can show you. I can help you. Don’t let this fear be the one reason you don’t graduate with honors,” Meyer said.

Mentoring students in research is a multistep process.

“You work together to come up with a project idea, and then you help walk them through the process of actually undertaking that research project,” she said. The research can be anything from a scoping review (a type of literature review that synthesizes existing research on a particular topic to identify major theories, concepts and gaps) to actually undertaking an original research project.

For this type of original research, mentoring becomes even more intense. Students need to earn their Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative credentials to show that they have been trained in the ethics and safety processes of undertaking research.

“Then, I work with them to design their study, which may include a survey, for example, and submit their application to the Institutional Review Board (to ensure that humans are protected when participating in research). The student then collects the data and analyzes it. Using the results, they will write a paper and create a poster,” Meyer said.

“I meet with them frequently throughout the process to mentor them and provide them with feedback. A major component is also helping hold them accountable. Sometimes, students will submit the paper for potential publication or the poster for presentation at a national conference,” she said.

Meyer has mentored over 20 students on their honors independent study capstone project. She also serves as the faculty adviser of the Student Collaboration for the Advancement and Promotion of Pharmacy, for which she earned the 2024 SDSU Students’ Association Award for Student Organization Adviser of the Year. And although she has garnered accolades for her work with students, for her, everything comes back to them.

“I am continually amazed and impressed by all that my students do, and it’s really an amazing opportunity to be able to support them along the way and see the efforts of their hard work realized,” she said.