REU SITES IN THE DIVISION OF EARTH SCIENCES AT NSF

The NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program supports active research participation by undergraduate students in any of the areas of research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Providing research experiences to undergraduate students has been documented to be important in motivating students to complete their science or engineering degrees and pursue a career in science (including graduate studies). These experiences provide students not only with in-depth technical knowledge of the discipline, but also help students understand the social and cultural norms of their fields. The goal of the REU program in the Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) at NSF program is to facilitate the involvement of undergraduate students in state of the art research projects and in all the steps of the scientific process, from development of hypothesis to be tasted to the presentation of the results at professional meetings. EAR fosters the implementation of a range of REU models, mindful of the diverse nature of the institutions, disciplines, and participants. Regardless of the model used, REU programs in EAR should have the following common characteristics: 1) the majority of the funds are to support participants in the program; 2) the recruitment plan should be designed to guarantee that the pool of applicants will produce a diverse group of participants; 3) the goals of each REU program should aligned with a clear set of metrics that will be used to evaluate the success of the REU in meeting its goals; 4) each REU site should not only have an strong scientific intellectual merit, but it should also have a strong REU intellectual merit; contributing to testing new approaches in mentoring, recruitment, and evaluation; 5) as with research proposals, the design of EAR REU programs should be informed by state of the art knowledge on research experience for undergraduates (e.g. peer review journal articles). It is expected that all REU sites provide a rich set of experiences that would enable the professional growth of the participants.