A model for summer undergraduate research experiences in emerging technologies

Abstract

Integrating emerging technologies into the curriculum is expected in our evolving discipline, although finding the time to master these can prove difficult. Institutional expectations for scholarly achievement need not take precedence; the use of an overarching theme for a summer research experience is presented as one approach to join a group of people with a unifying topic for study and discussion leading to the natural incorporation of the emergent technology into the curriculum.This paper presents a successful model for undergraduate summer research where participants, both faculty and students, investigated information security (IS) topics and learned from IS professionals. This was applied to individual research projects in disconnected areas in computing. The unifying experiences encouraged a collegial and supportive environment, firmly establishing peer and faculty / student collaboration. Student perceptions about the field and career options were positively effected, leading to increased interest in the emergent area as well as in future graduate studies.

Increasing student retention in computer science through research programs for undergraduates

“…4) Pay special attention to cohort building and mentoring; bring them together to work, train, and play (and give professors teaching credit for supervising such activities). Additional elements for a successful program can be found in [5,12], for example.…”

Teaching the principles of the hacker curriculum to undergraduates

“…In SISMAT, the focused nature and full day length of the labs and lecture allowed for more leisurely exploration of corner cases and difficult concepts [5]. We recognize that typical semester-length courses do not necessarily enjoy this advantage in pace.…”

ITiCSE 2010 working group report motivating our top students

“…NSF funding on the research experience in universities has stimulated initiatives which have provided opportunities for high achieving students to engage in authentic activities where they can apply their programming skills in a research context [4,37,71,83,85,88,89,104].…”

“…A number of research works indicate that such research experiences can be very effective to increase student retention and encourage undergraduates to continue their studies and enter graduate school. In the US, National Science Foundation sponsors the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, which enables universities to host small cohorts of undergraduate working on faculty-led research projects during summer months [37, 71,89]. Projects conducted at REU sites hosted at each university typically are centered on a particular unifying theme, e.g.…”