REU Site: Undergraduate Research in Immigration, Geography, and Race/Ethnicity in the United States

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This REU site is the continuation of 20 successful years of running a similar REU Site at the University of Texas at Austin, under the guidance of two new Principal Investigators. For this cycle, the organizing theme "Minority Group Demography" of the program focuses on impacts of immigration on the geography and social and economic conditions of U.S. racial and ethnic populations. Students have much to study and research about these impacts, as immigration is reshaping many U.S. racial/ethnic minority communities. This interdisciplinary focus reflects the expertise of the two new principal investigators: Nestor Rodriguez (Department of Sociology) and Rebecca Torres (Department of Geography and the Environment). It is expected that the students who are accepted into the program will continue to be a diverse group including under-represented minorities.Intellectual Merit. The intellectual merit of this REU Site at UT Austin is the academic and ethical development of junior social science scholars around a topic of immense importance to the United States. The goals are to provide the REU students with exposure, experience, and expertise. Precise program objectives have been developed to accomplish these goals. Exposure to social demography and geographic analysis is accomplished via formal coursework and seminars. In addition to the research projects, a series of professionalization workshops, or pro-seminars, are conducted during the summer. In these pro-seminars, the REU students discuss issues such as getting into graduate school and the myriad ethical concerns that social scientists confront during research. The REU students gain concrete experience in three ways. First, students learn about substantive issues concerning the social and spatial dimensions of impacts of immigration on racial and ethnic settings in the formal course. Second, students are introduced to statistical analysis of migration data in a programming lab and to spatial data analysis in Geography workshops. Third, students experience intense mentoring from Population Research Center (PRC) graduate students and faculty affiliates as they work to produce a stand-alone deliverable scholarly paper by the end of the summer program. Finally, the REU students demonstrate their expertise in two ways. They present their research work to a gathering of faculty affiliates, graduate students, and other invited scholars, and with travel support they will present their REU research papers at the annual fall meeting of the Southern Demographic Association (SDA).Broader impacts. The main broader impact of the program is to influence the future of higher education in the social sciences, with special attention to the racial/ethnic and gender diversity of the future academic workforce. The successes of the previous REU site program at UT Austin are already evident, including students who have recently earned their Ph.D.s and have been placed at leading research universities, a host of students who are in leading graduate programs around the country, and others who have recently completed the REU program and will be moving on to graduate school.