Early this fall I received a phone call from someone at UCLA. How common was it, the caller wanted to know, for colleges to have undergraduate research programs, and did I happen to know of others besides MIT’s? The next day another person from UC Davis called wanting to know the same thing. I wondered how many people at MIT might ask an identical question.

When UROP started in the fall 1969 semester, MIT was virtually the only kid on the block–we were the first and only school that invited every undergraduate to do research during the academic year with faculty in every single discipline. It wasn’t long before word spread and others began to copy the concept; in some cases, even the name. Although there are now dozens of UROP-like programs, you needn’t look too carefully to find big differences. Sometimes their program belongs to a single school or is open only to a single discipline. Or it is available specifically to honors students or other selected groups of students. (The University of Delaware, for instance, started out with an honors research program, the University of Michigan with a research program for incoming minority students.)

In the early 1980s, a national Council on Undergraduate Research was established by a network of university faculty and administrators to promote undergraduate research and lobby for funding. By the late 1980s, membership had expanded to about 200 colleges and universities. Most of these colleges had either just created or were about to create programs for undergraduate research. While counted as full programs, some were as small as a single research group with a single faculty member. None were much like MIT’s.

The National Science Foundation began to actively encourage undergraduate research in 1987 when it offered Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site and supplemental grants in math, science, and engineering. The push to expand undergraduate research and make connections with curricular and other changes has grown stronger in recent years. A current NSF grant announcement for "Vertical Integration of Research and Education in the Mathematical Sciences," offers a telling example. It calls for "the development of a community of researchers and scholars in which there is interaction among all the members" including "Undergraduate Research Experience such as faculty directed projects...and participation in interdisciplinary teams...[which] may range from group activities to an individual faculty member mentoring an undergraduate [and] should include exposure to the many opportunities for careers in the mathematical sciences and the development of communication skills."

In response to encouragement from NSF, as well as ongoing efforts to reinvigorate their curriculum, many schools are trying to broaden the base of programs that started originally on a narrow basis – to help integrate students from two-year colleges, for example. Some are expanding their programs so they will affect the school’s entire undergraduate experience. SUNY-Stony Brook, which consults frequently with us, cites their research programs for first-year women and minority students as responsible for increased retention. About 40 percent of its undergraduates now participate in research activities. Carnegie Mellon students pursue independent research and study through courses, paid work-study, senior honors programs, and internships. At a research symposium last year 200 student projects were presented. The University of Missouri and Kansas State University are tying research with discovery-based learning. Cornell is considering how to create a broad undergraduate research program. There are plenty of other examples. Caltech, incidentally, has long had a successful program called Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF), that may be the nearest in spirit to MIT’s UROP, although it includes students from other schools.

Chief among the differences between MIT’s and even the larger programs is our level of participation: 80 percent of seniors here have done at least one UROP. Another significant difference is the widespread nature of undergraduate research within MIT. Every department and interdisciplinary laboratory has UROPers. (The fact that in an institution whose prime emphasis is science and engineering 10 to 15 percent of UROPs happen in the humanities and the social sciences is exceptional.) Then, too, there is our insistence on the academic nature of the research experience. A paid UROP is recognized here on academic transcripts. It occasionally costs UROP a bit in participation numbers when we winnow "jobs" from paid but credit-worthy research experiences.

A hefty amount of UROP’s growth after 1973 was in the number of UROPs done for pay. This was aided, without doubt, by UROP’s waiving overhead (now called F&A costs) on stipends paid from sponsored research. The aim wasn’t only to make it inexpensive for faculty to pay undergraduates, but to encourage them to charge undergraduates to their research grants as they would if the students were fully-fledged professionals. If the waiver was to disappear someday, UROP staff occasionally wondered, would faculty continue to pay students from their own funds anyway? We would know the answer in 1995.

The indirect costs waiver disappeared on July 1, 1994. The question that summer was, would UROP survive? Would it change irrevocably? There seemed to be little chance it could remain the same. The new federal regulations applying indirect costs to sponsored research-paid UROP stipends would rack up the faculty costs of having a UROPer by 65 percent. Sponsored research money could no longer be "mixed" with UROP fund account money. UROP and the faculty would have to pay employee benefits, too. (The benefit percentage ricocheted around that spring, adding to the confusion, but thankfully settled at 6.5 percent, a special rate for UROP alone, where it will remain for the foreseeable future.) Worse yet, the overall financial climate didn’t look good either; federal research money was threatened across the board that summer. There didn’t seem to be any good news. An article in the April 1994 Faculty Newsletter by Walter Lewin, mincing no words, called it "The UROP Disaster."

Any program that experiences nothing but growth and success probably has a harder time coping with trouble–or being viewed as needy. For more than 20 years UROP made much out of little. Quarters were modest, staff was small. Waiving overhead and leveraging faculty money with a few hundred dollars of UROP’s own money, we were able to make many students and faculty happy most of the time. Negotiations over proposal funding may have been hard sometimes, but sooner or later students and faculty won funding. Now we all had to adjust to a different reality. Funding requests were going to be turned down; we had gotten used to saying "yes," and now we had to get used to saying "no." UROP needed to find a place in the line of programs in need of financial help and the ministrations of Resource Development. We had to become wiser about fundraising opportunities and be able to make UROP’s case. On the chance there was a political opening, we needed to make our case known in Washington, too.

To our surprise, the "disaster" never really happened. True, 1994 was not a good year, but it was not a terrible one either, and it looks more and more like UROP’s only bad year. After months of instability and turmoil we found more support than we anticipated, and UROP was able to begin to build a firmer financial foundation.

After an initial chill caused by the new regulations–when paid UROPs immediately decreased by 38 percent–things began to look up. The next semester, and every semester thereafter, faculty demonstrated their willingness to fund undergraduates, never mind that (a) stipends can no longer be shared between UROP and faculty, and (b) the added cost is now 74 percent of the basic stipend (6.5 percent employee benefits on the student stipend, plus 63.5 percent overhead on wages and benefits). It is hard to find this kind of support for undergraduate research anywhere else.

The happiest thing we learned as a result of the 1994 crisis was how much support for the program existed, and how UROP alumni – a substantial number of whom are out in the world now – are beginning to recognize what they gained from UROP. With a boost from the CUP in 1996 recommending MIT actively seek a $10 million endowment for UROP, there began to be a seismic shift in fundraising energy. A trickle of new funds became a stream. In spring 1997 the Paul Gray Endowment Fund for UROP became our largest endowed fund to date. We don’t have as much as $10 million yet, but we feel we are on our way. 

So what has really changed? A look back to the 1980s gives some perspective on where UROP is now.

The need for pay. 1980-81 marked the beginning of UROP’s second decade. Tuition, about to rise significantly and drive up the need to work for pay, was still only $6,200. UROP stipends paid $600 a semester and $2,200 in summer. (Stipends are now $1,050 a semester, $3,600 in summer). The self-help level for students on financial aid was $3,000. It was still possible for UROPers to earn more than a third of the total cost of their education, or well over 100 percent of their self-help, from a year’s UROP wages. This is no longer true. Not only is it harder to get today than in 1981, but a year-long UROP stipend now provides only 18 percent of the student budget, and 66 percent toward self-help. Keep in mind that over 60 percent of UROPers who work for pay are also recipients of financial aid, compared with 53 percent of undergraduates overall. Available time, of course, is the issue, else students would simply take jobs in addition to UROP.

Faculty sponsorship. Most faculty in 1981 typically paid about 60 percent of their students’ stipends from sponsored research grants; the rest came from UROP funds. Some students had their entire stipends paid by faculty, so they weren’t limited to the $600 or $2,200 ceilings. A few were paid entirely by UROP funds. The total faculty contribution to the student payroll by way of UROP in 1980-81 was a whopping $1.1 million–it was the first year earnings from sponsored research topped the million mark. Last year–fiscal year 1997–faculty payments to students were $4.4 million, once again reaching the same level as our 1993 record year that happened to occur the year before the "disaster" year. But in 1997 faculty sponsorship was without benefit of waived indirect costs or the encouragement of shared funding to ease the pain. Faculty are paying UROPers because they want to.

Motivation, and survey data. A 1981 survey reported that students named the "most significant gain" of UROP participation to be "personal contacts with professors and other professional members of the MIT community." In a 1993 UROP survey, 72 percent of UROP participants said getting to know a faculty member was an important gain from participation. This percentage trailed only slightly behind other factors, such as gaining research or professional experience and expertise, and earning money. Data from the Class of 1994 Senior Survey revealed that students doing UROP had more meaningful contact with their UROP supervisors than with their academic advisors and were more satisfied with the intellectual excitement in their major and with their undergraduate education as a whole. UROP supervisors were a prime source of graduate school or employment recommendations. Participation in UROP was correlated with improvement in intellectual curiosity, academic self-confidence, and writing and public speaking skills.

Focus on academics. Credit or pay–what’s the difference? The answer, of course, is that there should be none. Few other programs have managed to offer the choices MIT does – credit, pay, or volunteer – and still keep the program on a robust academic footing. Other programs frequently combine internships with varieties of independent study and research "jobs." By treating all modes alike in academic terms, UROP has upheld the same high standards for all participants. After the 1994 "disaster-that-wasn’t" UROP arranged for transcript recognition for paid and volunteer UROP’s and streamlined undergraduate-research-for-letter-grade designations (called "URG"), once a varied stew of independent study course numbers. Evaluations–still the primary feedback on the quality of the student’s and faculty member’s experience and always read closely – are to be written whatever the mode. To the extent they will affect undergraduate research, academic innovations resulting from the deliberations of the Task Force on Student Life and Learning will likely place UROP ever more securely as part of the curriculum. In a Student Advisory Committee Report prepared for the Task Force and reported in The Tech, students see a "research triad" of "academics, research, community." Also, The Tech explained, "research helps integrate theoretical science with engineering, community enables students to understand independence and adult life, and academics has always been the core of education."

UROP "off campus." In the 1970s students worked on UROPs with 200 non-profit organizations and nearby corporations. Students frequently had two supervisors, the off-campus supervisor and the MIT faculty member. This often created an awkward reporting situation. The off-campus program was beginning to give way by 1980-81 to a growing number of research opportunities available on campus, and increasing opportunities to earn pay. In 1994-95, after the indirect cost changes, corporate support for undergraduate research looked promising once again. We reinvented an off-campus program, a 1990s’ version called the Undergraduate Corporate Research Fellows (UCRF) program. It was announced in the May 1995 Faculty Newsletter in an article entitled "UROP Opens a Door to Industry." UCRF has prospered and is slowly but steadily growing. Sponsors, who pay a fee that comprises a student stipend, administrative costs, F&A (overhead), and materials and services for faculty, include over a dozen companies in the U.S. and in several foreign countries.

Early next year, UROP will be making a symbolic move. Building 20, UROP’s home since 1969, will be torn down near the end of spring 1998. This will bring an end to 28 years in the old "Rad Lab." In 1981, after more than 10 years in Building 20, a renovation of its two and a half rooms ended a decade of UROP’s looking like a 1970s’ style experimental program. A second renovation transformed UROP into part of an Undergraduate Education Office under the then-new dean for undergraduate education Margaret MacVicar.

In January we will move nearer the geographic center of MIT in the Infinite Corridor. We hope this temporary move will become permanent. It seems fitting that a program so central to the heart of the undergraduate academic experience should be on its way to a new neighborhood near Admissions and important and developing student and faculty support services. You could say we’re putting one of the best things at MIT on display as students come in the door.