Holli Duhon arrived at the University of Texas at Austin as an honors science student—who didn’t really understand the process of science. “In high school, science was straightforward,” she says. “The Nobel Prize was yours to claim if you just followed logical steps.”

In a traditional program, Duhon could have maintained that assumption for years as she worked her way through textbooks and lectures. But instead, she—along with more than 500 other first-year students—joined the three-semester Freshman Research Initiative (FRI), a large-scale program started in 2005 that teaches through experimental research.

Illustration: Robert Frank Hunter