Universal UROP Qualities
UROP offers students the opportunity to conduct research throughout every phase of their undergraduate careers.
Projects may be conducted on a pay, credit or voluntary basis and are available throughout the Institute in every academic department and in the majority of interdisciplinary laboratories and centers. Undergraduates are invited to join on-going faculty research projects or strike out on their own, to pursue a personal academic endeavor, invention, etc.
UROP provides a means for students to: get to know faculty, learn about a potential major, investigate an area of interest, gain practical skills and knowledge for a career or graduate school experience, and become involved in exciting research.
Since UROP is an academic program at MIT, all projects must share the following universal qualities:
- Research work worthy of academic credit (regardless of whether or not credit is requested);
- Active communication between the student and the faculty supervisor who is responsible for guiding the intellectual course of the student's work. Note: UROP supervisors should be MIT faculty. Post-docs and graduate students are welcome to serve as direct supervisors, provided that an MIT Affiliated Faculty is listed as the faculty supervisor on the students UROP application.
- A student-authored research proposal, containing a clear statement of purpose and describing in detail the student's planned research duties. These proposals must be submitted via our new online UROP proposal system by the given UROP deadline for the term/mode of participation.
- Feedback on the UROP experience. Both students and their faculty supervisors are required to submit evaluations of their research collaborations at the end of each semester and/or summer. We prefer that evaluations are submitted via the online UROP proposal system. However, if this is not convenient; e-mail to urop@mit.edu is also an acceptable means of submission.
