I am pleased to welcome you to this second issue of Kaleidoscope, the University of Kentucky Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship.

The level of scholarship displayed by undergraduate students at the University of Kentucky is extraordinary. Each of the articles published here has been refereed by at least one faculty member who has attested to the quality of the work and its suitability for publication. Many of the articles are excerpts from much longer studies, some of which have been published or are awaiting publication in various professional journals.

Once again this year, the range of subjects is impressive. Students at the University of Kentucky have submitted outstanding works of fiction, plus research and scholarly reports from the classics, psychology, anthropology, physics, chemistry, and biology. In addition, both faculty members who mentored our Beckman Scholars this year submitted brief pieces reflecting on the excitement and rewards of having undergraduates participate enthusiastically in the research activities of their laboratories. It is because of faculty members like these, who are dedicated to teaching undergraduates and involving them in research, that our students have the opportunity to excel. In the brief reports of awards and honors, it is clear, as I have noted on many occasions, that University of Kentucky students can compete successfully nationally and internationally. Recently, UK students won Fulbright Fellowships, National Science Foundation awards, National Institutes of Health grants, a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, a Johns Hopkins Health System Fellowship, and high rankings in a variety of national competitions sponsored by professional organizations in journalism, advertising, engineering, and computer programming.

I would like to emphasize that the students, whose work is represented both in the longer articles and in the awards and short research reports, range from first-year students to seniors. Scholarship is not limited to the last semesters of the undergraduate experience. The abstracts provided by the students in the UK Undergraduate Research Program, all of whom were first-year students, tell of exciting, scholarly involvement. This involvement from the earliest point in their college experience illustrates what I consider to be the great value of an education at a top-20 research university: the opportunity to learn from world-class scholars and to participate in their scholarly activities.

The first issue of Kaleidoscope demonstrated the great talents of our undergraduates to the people of the Commonwealth and the nation. This issue continues that tradition and, if anything, makes an even stronger case that our students conduct research and other scholarly pursuits of the highest quality, activities of significance and interest nationally and internationally.