Institutional partners are universities that are committed to scaling undergraduate research.
Get your department involved — apply today!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How long is an institutional partner commitment?
Institutional partners commit to participating for a year, but all partners are welcome to continue to participate for longer periods.
What are the eligibility requirements to become an institutional partner?
Any North American university that is willing to invest time, energy, and resources to increase their research capacity and can commit to our expectations is eligible to apply to participate.
Can Canadian schools apply to be institutional partners?
Yes, Canadian schools are eligible to apply as institutional partners. We have previously partnered with the University of Waterloo and the University of Alberta.
Are non-CS computing departments eligible to be institutional partners? Can students from these departments participate in the program?
Maybe. This program is open to departments/schools and students focusing in computing fields, including computer science, computer engineering, and information science. Other fields not housed in one of the departments listed here will be considered on a case by case basis.
Can the local coordinator be a staff member rather than a faculty member?
Yes, the local coordinator does not have to be a faculty member, but must be able to reach and communicate with local faculty, students, and departmental leaders.
When will institutional partner applicants be notified about the status of their application?
In general, applications for institutional partners are reviewed and evaluated on a rolling basis.
We plan to evaluate each application within a few weeks of its submission.
If you have not heard from a member of our team, please contact ur2phd@cra.org
The institutional partner application form asks about our recruitment strategy. What does this refer to?
This question is specifically asking about the recruitment strategy for the students who would be engaged in the UR2PhD program.
However, we hope that departments would also be committed to engaging as many first-time researchers as possible.
What are local coordinators specifically responsible for?
The Local Coordinator recruits, engages, and supports stakeholders. The main role of the local coordinator is student recruitment for both undergraduate research training and graduate student mentor training courses. Local coordinators should strive to engage as many students as possible.
Their specific responsibilities include:
- Leading the logistical and program-related activities at their home institution (i.e. recruiting faculty mentors, students, etc)
- This includes matching students to research mentors and projects.
- Managing communications between local stakeholders (i.e. undergraduate and graduate participants and faculty mentors) and program leadership
- Empowering students to take an active role in their research; encouraging participants to consistently communicate with their peers, mentors, and faculty advisors
- Encouraging undergraduate students to present their research at an on-campus, regional, or national venue
The time commitment for a local coordinator:
- Our team anticipates that the bulk of the local coordinators’ work will be recruiting students and matching them to mentors ahead of the undergraduate research training and graduate student mentor training courses commencing each time they are offered.
- During the term, local coordinator commitments are quite low (connecting with students, seeing if there are any students or mentors who require additional support).
- Shortly following the term, there will be a need to process and ensure that student participants receive course credit or pay depending on the student’s performance.
Our institutional partner guide can help provide local coordinators with additional details about how they can set up and manage UR2PhD locally.
How many students would I need to recruit to participate as an institutional partner?
We are open to discussing partnering with any institution that is committed to supporting undergraduate researchers.
When we launched the program, we were looking to engage departments that could engage at least 20 students per term. We expected most institutional partners to be large universities with hundreds of undergraduate students.
Beginning in 2025, to be considered an institutional partner, a department must have at least 6-9 undergraduate students successfully complete the Undergraduate Research Training Course in a calendar year.
If those numbers seem unattainable, we encourage you to connect with us to brainstorm how you may be able to attract, recruit, and support students from underrepresented populations. If institutional partnerships seem unlikely, students are also able to apply directly to the program. Details about student participation can be found under the undergraduate research training course page.
What is the involvement of faculty and staff at institutional partners during the undergraduate research training course?
To learn more about the expectations for faculty mentors of participants of the undergraduate research training course, please refer to the Faculty Mentor Expectations page.
Generally speaking, the undergraduate research training course is intended to be a student’s first introduction to research. CRA will provide training for students to learn foundational research skills. While the local institution provides either course credit or pay to the students for their participation. All undergraduate students engaged in the program will need to have a research advisor to mentor them on their research project, and this will need to be a faculty member and/or a graduate student.
Institutions do not need to create a separate course with an instructor, but we understand that the university might require a local course number and an instructor of record who also engages in some minimal number of hours with students.
CRA has budgeted funding for each institutional partner to designate a “local coordinator.” The local coordinator will run the student selection and placement process, make sure that the students are keeping up with the research methods course and their research projects, deal with any issues that arise with the students in the program, answer administrative questions about academic credit or pay, etc. They will not need to be mentoring students on a research project.
What requirements do students need to meet to participate in the undergraduate research training course?
Students will need to have (1) a research team, (2) a research advisor, and (3) availability to attend the same course section as their teammates. Research teams should be groups of 2-4 undergraduate students working on a computing research project.
How do the undergraduate students get involved in the research? What are their research topics?
To participate in the research methods course, students need to have a research team, project and mentor.
Local coordinators can either have students identify projects and mentors on their own, or they can decide to match students to faculty/projects.
Are “homework assignments” assessments related to participant’s research project?
All assignments are related to participant’s research projects e.g, write an abstract, conduct a literature review, etc.
To view a full list of assignments, please see the resources tab.
Can students drop out of the program after the first semester/quarter?
Students are expected to commit to the program in its entirety.
It is our hope that students will complete the course, which culminates in a research proposal and presentation. We hope that students will continue to work on research, and that they will implement the research proposal they created. CRA has a limited pool of funds available to support REUs.
When will the undergraduate research training course begin?
In 2024, we will be offering the course in the summer and the fall. In 2025, we will be offering sessions in the spring, summer, and fall.
To see full schedules, please refer to the undergraduate research training course page.
UR2PhD: Undergraduate Research Methods Course by Computing Research Association’s UR2PhD Program. This work, “UR2PhD Undergraduate Research Methods Course”, is adapted from “Early Research Scholars Program” by Christine Alvarado, UC San Diego, used under CC BY 4.0. “UR2PhD Undergraduate Research Scholars” is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the Computing Research Association’s UR2PhD Program and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
UR2PhD: Graduate Student Mentor Training Course by Computing Research Association’s UR2PhD Program is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
