Collaborative research is a demanding endeavor, and for a group of undergraduate students tasked with identifying their own interdisciplinary research problem, the challenges are even greater. "It was scary--we didn't know what to ask the professors, and we couldn't decide on a research question," says Miran Park, a student at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), about her first quarter there in the Collaborative Learning at the Interface of Mathematics and Biology (CLIMB) program. The CLIMB program abandons the traditional apprentice model for research experiences, says Rick Grosberg, its principal investigator and an evolutionary ecologist. Unlike many undergraduate research experiences, CLIMB does not assign a project or enlist students in current faculty research. Each year a cohort of biology and math majors in their junior or senior year becomes part of an interdisciplinary collaborative team that uses "mathematics and computation to answer state-of-the-art questions in biology."