"Minority Group Demography" has been, and will continue to be, the organizing theme for this program. Notably, this program continues to be comprised of roughly 60% under-represented minority group students and about 70% female students; a majority of the REU participants go on to graduate programs. The intellectual merit of this REU Site is the academic and ethical development of junior social science scholars around a topic of immense importance to the future of the United States. The PIs seek to provide the REU students with (1) exposure, (2) experience, and (3) expertise. Specifically, they want to expose undergraduates to both the technical tools and professional culture of social science, and to do that through the scientific course of inquiry in social demography. The PIs want the REU students to experience the rigorous course of study and intensity of the scientific research process firsthand. Additionally, they want these students to demonstrate their expertise as junior members of the academy. To accomplish these goals, the Pis have developed precise program objectives. To begin with, they expose the REU students to social demography via formal course work and seminars. An undergraduate sociology course, Analytic Demography, comprises the heart of the first one-half of the summer at our REU site. In addition, they conduct a series of professionalization workshops, or ?proseminars,? which the REU Site Director and Co-Director hold during the summer. In these proseminars, REU students discuss issues ranging from getting into and paying for graduate school to the myriad ethical issues that demographers and other social scientists confront in conducting their work. Our students will gain concrete experience in three ways. First, the formal course focuses on the methods and materials of demographic research, with an emphasis on the demography of minority groups. Second, the related Stata programming lab provides students with an introduction to statistical analysis and computer literacy to gain competence in the analysis of population-based data sets. Third, the students will experience an intense mentored research relationship with Population Research Center (PRC) graduate students and faculty affiliates. The REU students will be expected to produce, at the end of the summer, a stand-alone ?deliverable? in the form of a scholarly paper, and have much support in doing so.
Finally, the REU students will demonstrate their expertise at the end of this program in two ways. First, the students will present their research work at the end of the summer to a group of PRC faculty affiliates and graduate students. Second, each of our students will be funded to present his or her REU research paper at the annual meeting of the Southern Demographic Association (SDA) in the fall following the close of the summer program. The SDA has dedicated two sessions each year to the REU alumni in the past, has been very welcoming of these students, and will be asked to do so again.
The broader impact of this 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. This REU site program aims to influence the continued development of both sociology and demography as fields by helping to train the next generation of population scholars in a rigorous, ethical, and multi-racial/ethnic context.
