Summer Program Gives Undergraduates a Graduate Research Experience

For some undergraduate students from around the world, summer is a time to experience what it's like to do graduate research at UC Berkeley.

The Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research on campus is an eight-week session that teams primarily college juniors with professors and graduate students to conduct research.

Started in 1991 by Sheila Humphreys, currently the director of diversity for the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, and a group of graduate students who wanted to increase diversity in the science and engineering fields, the program expanded to include most of the engineering disciplines, rather than electrical engineering and computer sciences only.

"(The program's goal has been to) increase diversity in the graduate pipeline and it has succeeded," Humphreys said. "Undergraduate research is the most effective avenue to graduate school."

Since 1991, 66 percent of students who attended the program, funded by the National Science Foundation, have gone on to graduate school, according to a 2002 department report.

For 70 percent of the students since 1991, doing the program was the first time they performed research. Arlo Faria, a current graduate student in computer science at UC Berkeley, says participating in the program in 2003 helped him decide to apply for graduate school on campus.

"It made me certain … that I wanted to go to grad school and be at Berkeley," Faria said.

More than half of the professors in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department have participated in the program since 1991. David Wagner, associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, who mentored 10 students this summer, said the program gives him a chance to help students develop their research topics.

"I'm able to help them find problems that are important and unsolved … that they can make some progress in," he said.

Elisa Lewis, coordinator of the Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research-Computer Science in the Interest of Society, said students were each paired with a professor with similar interests to give them direction on their research.

Yacin Nadji, a program participant from the Illinois Institute of Technology, says this experience has given him more perspective on what it's like to do research.

"You think research would be the same everywhere, but the approach is different in different schools … It helped me (see) a little more ... what is out there," Nadji said.

Tags: SUMMER UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH