Lowering Barriers to Entry in Undergraduate Research Through Student-Led Virtual Workshops

Undergraduate research is a high-impact learning experience, but undergraduate students interested in research often face high barriers to entry, such as limited guidance, confusing application processes, and feelings of not belonging. These barriers are especially prohibitive to first-year students, first-generation students, and members of underrepresented groups, and COVID-19 exacerbated the difficulty of undergraduates joining research by reducing opportunities to gain meaningful research experiences. To address these challenges, we designed a novel extracurricular education program named Starting an Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) in the fall 2020 with the goal of lowering barriers to entry for engineering students to gain research experiences. Over 150 students enrolled in the workshop series throughout both semesters and were put into small groups led by research-experienced undergraduate peer mentors to cement skills from the workshop and to answer students’ questions on a one-on-one basis. A pre- and post-workshop survey was administered to measure students’ major interests, how they define research and engineering, sense of belonging, and perceived barriers to getting involved in research. After participating in SURE, students reported lower perceived barriers to entry in research and were more likely to obtain a research position.