An REU Site for Undergraduate Research Training in the Geosciences

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Summary of Proposed Work During a ten week summer program, 14 undergraduates will participate substantively in the research of a scientist at the Broad Branch Road campus of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which includes both the Geophysical Laboratory and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Primary criteria for selection will be scholarship, personal motivation, scientific potential as judged by student references, and a good match of student interests with available research programs. At the beginning of the program, students will be assigned an advisor and with that advisor will decide on a research project related to some aspect of earth or planetary geoscience research. Students will be instructed by advisors in the methods utilized in the research, with the goal of completing a project that is part of the larger research effort of the advisor by the end of the summer. Students will then write a short research proposal after two weeks of reading and preliminary work. The group will also meet each week for informal lunchtime seminars and conversation with staff scientists at the Broad Branch Road campus, giving students a personal introduction to the interests, research programs, and career paths and choices of scientists that have led to their current positions at Carnegie. Field trips to sites of geological interest in the Washington area will complement the summer research experience, as will trips to other sites where undergraduates are also working on summer research projects. Students will prepare a research paper describing the results of their research, and will present the results to their peers and the research staff at a special symposium held during the last week of the program. Students will be encouraged to submit the results for presentation at a professional meeting, or use the results as part of a senior project. The success of our program will be measured by the quality of student papers and presentations, as well as the responses to a survey given to students at the completion of the summer. We have also tracked the progress of students since our initial year in 1999, and have begun to accumulate data on the career paths of our interns; we will include an analysis of this data in our evaluations