Supported by the National Science Foundation, CURE undergraduate researchers, including Inara Colon and Maggie Oti, receive a small stipend plus room and board.
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Summer Jobs That Can Change the World
Undergraduate research opportunities focus on groundbreaking science
Some students spend their summer scooping ice cream and hanging out at the beach. Others prefer working to solve the biggest scientific and social challenges of the 21st century.
For Inara Colon, a senior from the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, and Maggie Oti, a Franklin, Massachusetts native and a junior at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the opportunity to hone research skills was more appealing than a summer behind the soft-serve counter.
Colon and Oti are two of the more than 100 students who spent this summer on the UMass Amherst campus working elbow to elbow with professors, researchers, and graduate students on projects ranging from nanotechnology to renewable energy to the study of African American dialect.
The Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) is open to students from around the United States. UMass Amherst’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research in Energy (CURE) program of which Colon and Inari are part, enrolls 17 REU students. More than 150 applied to the CURE program, says managing director Mike Wright.
The women both say they applied to the program to be involved in cutting-edge research that will give them the opportunity to publish and prepare for graduate school.
“I Googled renewable energy and the first thing that came up was a video of Professor George Huber demonstrating his work on biofuels,” says another of the summer researchers, talking about the UMass professor well known for his work turning biomass into “grassoline.”
Oti says during a typical summer day she was in the lab on the 14th floor of the Lederle Research Tower from nine o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock each night.
It wasn’t all work for the REUers. They lived together in the Thatcher and North residential halls and their outings included pizza, bowling, even a trip to New York City. Still, work is what it was all about. They understand the special opportunity they’ve had to be part of research that might change the world as well as their own lives. “It’s a proving ground for them. They’re thrown into the deep end of the pool and it’s sink or swim,” Mike Wright explains. “We find that they swim.”