Join our nine-week residential research experience in 2024, funded by the National Science Foundation. College students from all social science disciplines are welcome.
Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool) has excelled for more than 25 years at providing education for students interested in technology and its impacts on industry, education, health, the environment, and other sectors. Professors at the iSchool have received funding from the National Science Foundation to support a nine-week residential research experience in summer 2024 at the Syracuse campus in beautiful upstate New York. Successful applicants will receive $6000 in stipend funding plus free meals and housing.
Features
- College students from all social science disciplines are welcome, including psychology, sociology, geography, education, political science, communications, and more
- The only prerequisites are an interest in doing social science research and the willingness to learn new skills
- After one week of online training at the end of May, the experience includes nine weeks on campus with apartment-style living, a pre-paid meal plan, daily seminars, research activities, mentoring, and professional development
- The theme of the research experience is learning how to analyze text when used as research data for social science research; students can choose among a wide range of interesting research problems and data sets provided by faculty
- All students will learn how to write code in Python; no prior experience with programming languages is needed
- Mentoring will continue after the experience via an online community that can help with publishing, graduate school applications, and professional networking
Program Goals
A key goal of the REU site lies in encouraging students to sustain their research interests in their subsequent educational activities upon return to their home institutions. The project contributes to the development of a capable STEM workforce for the U.S., insofar as the ability to analyze natural language text with computers has become a mission-critical skill in many sectors. Some students may also progress to research careers where they develop insights into internet-related social phenomena that impact people’s lives. Upon return to their home institutions, students can demonstrate the new methods and tools they have learned and inspire others to try them.
Learning activities for the students in this NSF-supported Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site include research methods workshops, data ethics seminars, training on several software applications, and professional development opportunities. Students ask and answer impactful research questions using data sets provided by their faculty mentors. Students present their own research results in the final week. Every student is encouraged to submit their research to an appropriate research conference after completion of the experience. Students achieve their learning goals in this REU site by affiliating themselves with active research projects being conducted by Syracuse University faculty members and their doctoral mentees. School of Information Studies faculty members conduct research on human language technologies, computational social science, social media, disinformation, human-centered computing, and a variety of related topics. These projects typically offer large data sets that REU students can explore as they develop their technical skills with programming languages, data mining, statistics, linguistics, and deep learning.
For full consideration in the initial screening, we need people to complete the screening survey by Friday, 11/3/23. Subsequently, we will contact finalists for additional documentation, which we will need to receive by Friday, 11/17/2023. Following phone interviews with finalists, all decisions will be complete before Friday, 12/29/2023.
