Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP)

What is research, why does it matter, and how will it help you? The UROP Colloquium is a training course that seeks to answer these questions for UROP students. The Colloquium will be led by your UROP Leader, an undergraduate student experienced in research, and will offer you support in learning about research, finding and contributing to a faculty project, and presenting your work.

You will meet for your research colloquium once every two weeks for Fall and Spring semesters. This one-credit-hour pass/fail course is designed to introduce you to research and offer ongoing support through your participation in UROP. You are fully responsible for tuition and course fees for the UROP Colloquium. In the Colloquium, you will discuss and engage with research topics, meet and hear from prestigious guest speakers, and learn hands-on at skill-building workshops.

By the end of the academic year and the Colloquium, UROP students will be able to:

• Define research and identify its role in the world
• Identify basic research designs and methods
• Read and review peer-reviewed articles
• Identify ethical concerns regarding research integrity and responsibility
• Write a research abstract
• Present their research in an academic/research setting
• Engage with a faculty member in a research setting.

Through the colloquium, you should feel prepared and empowered to contribute substantially to your research project and present a poster reflecting your research endeavors during the Undergraduate Research Symposium in the spring.

With the help of your UROP Leader, you will select a UROP project to work on. In this assistantship with your Research Mentor, you will have duties that vary by discipline and specific project, but may include tasks like preparing samples, collecting data, conducting interviews, or compiling sources. This assistantship lasts for two semesters.

The UROP assistantship functions on inquiry-based learning. Traditionally, you learn through reading about topics and theories in the classroom, but here you will learn actively by combining this theory with practice, much in the same way that your Research Mentor is learning every day.

To see the research projects which UROP students worked on this year, view the Undergraduate Research Symposium page.

Some examples of the research you could do in your assistantship include:

In the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields: lab research, testing and working with equipment, sample preparation, data collection and entry, experimentation, bench work, running assays, working with model organisms, collecting data, learning laboratory techniques

In the Social Sciences: community-based research, conducting and transcribing interviews, surveys, data collection, analysis and organization, bibliographic work, editing, indexing, assembling sources, reading for and preparing literature reviews, descriptive and analytical statistics, participant observation, content analysis, visual interpretations, incorporating theoretical perspectives

In the Arts and Humanities: library research, bibliography, compiling sources, archival research, literature reviews, writing summaries and abstracts, indexing, manuscript preparation, Special Collections research, digital retrieval of primary sources (books, manuscripts, paintings, videos, etc.), assistance with performance art, fact-checking, writing for permissions, database research

Project Selection
UROP students will apply and interview for UROP projects they are interested in participating in, and Research Mentors will select their assistants. Your UROP Leader will facilitate this process by helping you identify your own strengths and interests and guiding you to projects and Research Mentors that best fit you.

Working with your Research Mentor
Once you have been selected to assist a Research Mentor, they will outline your role in the project and their expectations. Together, you and your Research Mentor will develop a schedule, find background readings and resources, discuss the broader theoretical frameworks of the project, and discuss the purpose and goals of the project and your contribution to it. Once you are familiarized with your Research Mentor and the project, you will be responsible for contributing to the project in keeping with your Research Mentor's expectations and established schedule. This will likely include your involvement in research team meetings and regular and continuous feedback on your performance.

One of the greatest advantages of participating in UROP is the relationship you build with your Research Mentor, and we encourage you to actively nurture that relationship by doing your best work during your UROP assistantship and continuing to work with your Mentor once your UROP experience is over.

All UROP students will present their work in the Undergraduate Research Symposium, where they will showcase their contributions to their Research Mentor's projects. Part of the Colloquium will be to prepare you to present a poster at the symposium.

One of the most important parts of research is sharing your findings with the rest of the academic community. At the President's Showcase in the Fall, you'll get to see what this looks like and how it fits into the academic culture at Florida State. In the Spring at the Undergraduate Research Symposium, you'll be participating yourself. This rewards you with a conference presentation in your first or second year, a marker of your ability to not only conduct research but to communicate your results effectively; this is an opportunity that many students do not have until their junior or senior year, if at all.

The purpose and outcomes of UROP go beyond providing assistance to faculty or introducing students to research. By engaging students and faculty in the university's main missions - teaching and research - in a way that gives students one-on-one access to faculty and gives faculty access to the next generation of researchers, the entire university culture benefits.

A large body of scholarship suggests that programs like UROP have a strong impact on undergraduate education, retention, GPA, and graduation rates. The University of Michigan has conducted their own studies on the effects of their UROP program (on which our program draws as a model), the results of which can be seen here.

The Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement and the Division of Undergraduate Studies expect UROP to directly contribute to

1. Retention, as outlined in the Michigan study,
2. Recruitment, by offering a student experience unique in the state of Florida,
3. Reputation, through presentations at conferences and peer perception of the program, and
4. Rankings, by investing in our undergraduate education and academic culture.

Please see some of these studies for analyses on the benefits of programs like UROP:

• The University of Michigan's evaluation of its own program
• Undergraduate Student-Faculty Research Partnerships Affect Student Retention
• Minorities and UROP
• Undergraduate Research, Graduate Mentoring, and the University's Mission
• Benefits of Undergraduate Research Experiences