Apply to the School of Public Policy Undergraduate Research Experience Program
Research opportunities will be posted here as they become available. The positions below are still open. Faculty are reviewing applications and will respond to inquiries on a rolling basis. While you may apply to more than one UREP position at a time, please only accept one research role within the School of Public Policy in a given semester to ensure opportunities for other students.
If you have your own idea for an independent study, ask your advisor for support in connecting with a sponsoring faculty member.
Research in Public Policy
Students may apply to do research in public policy regardless of their major. The credits earned by completing public policy research will be SPP 398R.
Spring 2026 | Variable credits 1 - 3, depending on the student's availability (3 hours/week = 1 credit, 6 hours/week = two credits, 9 hours = 3 credits)
Position Description: Students will join a research team of faculty, a postdoc, and graduate/undergraduate students, carrying out a large-scale nationally-representative survey of university leaders at 2-year, 4-year, MA-granting, and PhD-granting public institutions. The goal for the research is to better understand how race, gender, and nationality impact the experience of university leaders to develop better institutional policies aimed at diversifying university leadership. But much of the work at this stage in the project is collecting names and email addresses for university leaders that are part of the sample so that we can send out the surveys. The students will work with the team to ensure high-quality data collection and will be part of team meetings where we think through methodological issues.
What You Will Learn: Students will learn new skills around data collection, survey research, and research design. They will gain understanding of the challenging nature of social science research and hopefully also a sense of the camaraderie of working on research teams.
Prerequisites: Ideally, the student will have taken a course in research methods, but we will accept students from any class year.
How to Apply: Students can share a resume and a 1-2 paragraph email outlining their interests in the project.
Spring 2026 | 2 credits (6 hours/week)
Position Description: Affordable housing is a persistent, pressing problem in the United States. This project explores the use of community land trusts (CLTs) as a model for increasing the supply. The project has three faculty involved (Professor Schweik and Katz) however at this stage the students will primarily work with Professor Bushouse. The tasks are to learn what is known and not known about CLTs through a rigorous review of academic and public scholarship. We will also build a dataset of CLTs in the U.S. Our semester research is the basis for a National Science Foundation grant proposal to the Science of Organizations program. Here is a link to the program: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/soo-science-organizations. The team meets weekly during the spring semester at time TBD, based on the team members' availability.
What You Will Learn: The skills students will learn include: learning how to search a wide array of sources, use Zotero bibliographic software, apply a coding scheme to the all the sources (using a spreadsheet). The soft skills include working on a professional research team. The knowledge students will gain includes housing policy, laws, and practices. Depending on the student's performance on the team, they may be asked to participate in developing the grant proposal, assisting in preparing slides for presentations. If the student has a lasting interest in housing policy, the UREP position could develop into a capstone project.
Prerequisites: Students must have taken SPP 280 Public Policy, SPP 203 (or RES-ECON 102 or ECON 103), and SPP 204 (or equivalent).
How to Apply: Email Professor Bushouse an email with a paragraph describing your interest and suitability for the project that includes any previous exposure to housing policy, either personal or course content. Include your resume as an attachment to the email.
Research in Legal Studies
Students may apply to do research in legal studies regardless of their major. The credits earned by completing public policy research will be LEGAL 398R.
Spring 2026 | Variable credits 1 - 3, depending on the student's availability (3 hours/week = 1 credit, 6 hours/week = two credits, 9 hours = 3 credits)
Position Description: Research assistants will help Professors Collins, Rice, and Rhodes collect information about depictions of law and legality in LGBTQ+ media, such as The Advocate. This will involve reading articles in LGBTQ+ media and coding the articles based on things like the types of rights featured in the articles (e.g., same sex marriage, employment), court decisions discussed in the articles, and the legal and political actors depicted in the articles. The objective of this research is to understand what legal issues are prominent on the agenda of LGBTQ+ media and how the legal consciousness of the LGBTQ+ community changes over time. Students must be available for weekly meetings that will be held in person on Thursdays from 10:00AM-11:00AM throughout the semester.
What You Will Learn: Students will learn to conduct rigorous social science research, and learn about the history of legal disputes involving the LGBTQ+ community.
Prerequisites: Legal 101, PoliSci 101, or equivalent.
How to Apply: Please send an email to Professor Collins ([email protected]) with a resume, expression of interest (including relevant skills), and the name of a faculty member reference. In addition, be sure to indicate that you are able to make the weekly meetings held on Thursdays from 10:00-11:00 in your application.
Professors Collins and Rice are looking for a research assistant to help them with a project that investigates the ideological diversity of legal scholarship. The research assistant will conduct internet-based research on the backgrounds of the authors of legal scholarship in an effort to understand the scholarship they produce. For example, one aspect of this project will explore whether legal scholars were former Supreme Court law clerks, are connected to the Federalist Society or the American Constitution Society, and the like.
Students will learn to perform social science research, including applying rigorous coding protocols. Students will also learn about the ideological diversity of the legal academy.
Legal 101, PoliSci 101, or equivalent
Research in Additional Areas
The Reimagining Justice Lab is looking for research assistants for spring semester. This is a great opportunity to engage with a lively group of fellow undergraduates, explore what social scientific research can be like, gain experience, and be part of a wonderful team of researchers. The Reimagining Justice Lab is a collaborative research group based out of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and led by Professor Joshua Kaiser. Together, we work together to research the ways laws, state actions, and state crimes produce and are produced by intersectional oppression. This work incorporates evidence and perspectives of justice based in social systems, community accountability, and transformative change. Current research is in two areas: the causes and consequences of the hidden penal state in the United States and the place of genocide in the modern world order. Various teams take on different aspects of the research, including digitization of archival documents, legislative tracing, qualitative data collection of historical evidence, computational modeling, and statistical cleaning and analysis. If you are interested in applying or learning more, please visit https://forms.gle/xHvjdMLcdjBrDFVi9. We take equity and inclusion very seriously in hiring and mentorship, so we especially encourage members of underrepresented groups to apply. Learn more here: https://propel.umass.edu/projects/reimagining-justice-lab
PROPEL is a resource for students to apply to open projects during 5 rounds over the academic year. This is the link to the projects that are open https://propel.umass.edu/projects. PROPEL will be open for undergraduates to apply on November 7 AT 1:00PM and ending on November 17 at 5am. Students can apply to up to 5 projects. Students need to log in to set up an account and then write a short profile about themselves. When they apply to a particular project, students will write maybe a couple of paragraphs on why they are interested in the project.
The Office of Undergraduate Research and Studies (OURS) is a branch of the Learning Resource Center and serves as the centralized research and resource office for the campus. OURS helps students find and access undergraduate research and scholarly opportunities on and off campus, throughout the year. We serve students in all disciplines at every stage of their undergraduate careers. Students are also supported in preparing for and navigating the application process for research and scholarly opportunities. Learn more here.
Before Applying...
Have you had your resume and cover letter reviewed by SBS Pathways? During the semester, there are walk-in hours with Peer Advisors in Thompson 128 (M, T, W 10-4 and Th, F 10 - 2) to get you started.
Frequently Asked Questions
By participating in a UREP students work collaboratively with faculty to develop studies with real‐world significance and to carry them out with practical, readily transferable skills that will provide them with a crucial edge in the job market. Students who gain sophisticated research skills will be highly sought after by potential employers: they will understand how to conduct research; how to choose and use the appropriate qualitative or quantitative methods to carry out studies; how to work collaboratively towards a common goal; and how to write effectively in order to convey their findings to the public. These students will be able to not only tell potential employers about the classes they took, but clearly indicate on their resumes and in their interviews the deliverables that they helped produce. Furthermore, these students will gain critical information about substantive public policy and legal topics that will offer them an advantage in competing for internships and jobs in public policy or the civil service.
Student researchers are encouraged to present the research conducted through the UREP at conferences like the Massachusetts Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference. They receive opportunities to co-author reports, and they are able to incorporate the skills and methodology learned through the program into their capstone or thesis projects. Most importantly, the UREP is a unique opportunity which students can include on their resumes as they apply for graduate school or enter the workforce.
The topics and projects that have already been advanced through the UREP reflect the breadth of faculty expertise in the School of Public Policy. In past semesters, for instance, the students have been trained to construct and manage public opinion surveys and analyze data through the UMass Poll; to draft in-depth literature reviews about sanitation reform in India; to conduct archival research on the death penalty; and to compile and analyze a database of the ratification of international environmental treaties – just to name a few projects!
The UREP projects are compensated through academic credit, not a paycheck. Students selected to participate in UREP will be enrolled in SPP or LEGAL 398R - Research Practicum. Students may take up to 18 practicum credits while at UMass. Those credits may count toward the total needed for graduation.
For Legal Studies majors, the research credits do not count toward major requirements.
For Public Policy majors, a maximum of 4 credits of applied coursework - research credits and/or internship credits - may count toward major requirements.
In general, 1 credit hour is equivalent to about 40 hours of work (3 hours per week) during the semester and students may enroll for up to 4 credits per semester.