The Office of the Provost awarded a record 102 summer undergraduate research grants last spring, said Peter Civetta, assistant to the associate provost for undergraduate education.
The swell in grants stemmed from a more than 20-percent increase in applications, which totaled 243 for 2010. The previous record was fewer than 200, he said.
Applications were due at the beginning of March. Suddenly, in his first year working in the position, Civetta had a choice to make – continue funding close to 40 percent of proposals and break the budget, or make the process more selective.
He vetted his concerns to Ronald Braeutigam, associate provost for undergraduate education .
“I had heard about how much undergraduate research is valued,” Civetta said. “Here was a really interesting moment where I thought: Is the University going to put its money where its mouth is?”
University Provost Daniel Linzer ultimately decided that if more students showed interest, the University wasn’t going to block research opportunities for them.
NU offers undergraduate research grants for the academic year and the summer. Summer grants give students a $3,000 stipend to cover their research and living expenses, versus $1,000 in the academic year that covers only research.
Part of the reason for the increase in grant applications could be increased outreach efforts from the provost’s office, he said.
The state of the economy could also have contributed, he said. In a stagnant job market – the New York Times reported last November that the average unemployment rate for people ages 15-24 with a high school diploma was still near 15 percent – a research grant is a paid summer.
Communication senior Jennifer Skene was one of the 102 undergraduates to receive funding. She applied after hearing about the program from people who had applied in the past.
In an attempt to generate senior thesis ideas for her anthropology double major, she spent the summer studying renewable energy programs on the White Earth Indian Reservation in northwest Minnesota.
For eight weeks, she conducted interviews and learned about the link between the tribe’s culture and energy programs.
“You spend three years as an anthropology major, but you can’t really understand what it’s all about until you go out and do it yourself,” Skene said.
Other students studied topics ranging from astrophysics to nanotechnology to the emerging rock culture in Brazil, Civetta said.
Proposals are read and ranked by a 15-professor committee on a scale from one to five, with one as the best possible score. In prior years, the committee usually considered a proposal with an average around 2.3 strong enough to get funded.
Administrators are excited about the booming sphere of undergraduate research grants, Civetta said.
“At high levels of the University, people are showing unequivocal support for this,” he said.
