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.
The REU project at the Population Research Center (PRC) at The University of Texas at Austin focused on training REU students in research about the impacts of immigration on different institutions and populations in the United States. In its three-year duration of 2010-2012, the project had important outcomes for the advancement of knowledge and analytical skill among three annual cohorts of eight young university students. In each year of the REU project, the eight-student cohort received extensive social-scientific knowledge and training, as well as extensive research mentoring from graduate students, which enabled the students to produce original analytical papers advancing the state of knowledge in the research fields of community development, immigration studies, education of minority groups, and health disparities among different racial and ethnic populations. The production of these papers, and their presentation in the annual conferences of the Southern Demographic Association, serve as the initial contribution to knowledge that many of the young REU scholars will make in their research careers. Using the resources of the PRC, the REU students received advanced training from scholars that are recognized nationally and internationally for their research. All of the training personnel of the PRC have strong research records, and the Principal Investigator (Dr. Nestor Rodriguez) and Co-Principal Investigator (Dr. Rebecca Torres) of the REU project, who were directly involved in designing and conducting the REU project, together have over 40 years of research experience and over 100 research publications. The REU students had access to the data labs of the PRC, as well as to the research lab of the Department of Geography and the Environment, at The University of Texas. The REU project had a broader impact that went beyond the research training for three cohorts of students. The broader impact consisted of training students of under-represented groups in social science research. In the three-year period of the REU project at PRC, one half of the 24 students that participated in the REU training program were African American (3) and Hispanic (9). The other REU students were Asian American (4), non-Hispanic white (5), and no identity recorded (3). In addition, half of the 24 students who participated in the three years of the REU project at the PRC, were young women. Given that 10 of the 24 students that went though the REU project are attending graduate programs, the REU project has helped to build a national labor force for social scientific research that is increasingly reflecting the diverse population composition of the society. In this way, the REU projected is helping to increase social equality in society and to promote occupational parity in the social science research industry of the country.
