This proposal supports the continuation of Georgia Tech's Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering (SURE) program to serve ten students per year for three years. The overall goal of SURE is to expose underrepresented minority students to electrical and computer engineering research, and as a direct consequence, to interest them in opportunities available through graduate study. Key elements of the program include ten weeks of challenging research in critical electrical and computer engineering areas (including optoelectronics, integrated circuits and devices, and digital signal processing), pairing of each student with both a faculty advisor and a graduate student mentor, a weekly seminar on emerging research in the dynamic field of electrical and computer engineering, opportunities to visit local industrial research sites, preparation of oral and written research summaries, and social and cultural interactions between the student participants and their graduate mentors.
Programs such as SURE are an essential component of enhancing minority enrollment in advanced degree programs and ultimately, increasing the size of the minority Ph.D. population. The persistence gap between majority students and underrepresented minorities is evident only when proceeding from the Bachelor's to the Master's degree. The absence of such a gap when proceeding from either the B.S. or M.S. to the Ph.D. implies that once admitted to graduate school, underrepresented students are equally committed to pursuing the doctorate. The primary challenge therefore is getting underrepresented students to consider the graduate school option. This is a challenge that is currently being met by SURE. Since its inception in 1992, approximately 90% of SURE's nearly 250 total participants have gone to graduate school, and nearly half of those have come to Georgia Tech.
