This twelve-week summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program in The College of Optics & Photonics (CREOL) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) will engage ten undergraduate students in research and other educational experiences focused in the areas of lasers, optics, and nanophotonics. The REU program will be comprised of five basic components: 1) introductory informal coursework on basic principles of optics, lasers, and nanophotonics; 2) research seminars; 3) industrial site visits to several optics and laser companies in the Orlando area; 4) weekly monitoring of the students' progress by the PIs; and 5) an ethics component.
The Ethics Component will be comprised of a series of four workshops: 1) Workshop #1- An overview of the basic tools of ethics, students' project topic assignment, and discussion of the relevance of ethics to everyday research; 2) Workshop #2- Intellectual property; implied personal ethics, research in ethics, crime and security, integrity and quality research; 3) Workshop #3- Open discussions of student projects and findings; and 4) Workshop #4- Preparation of a summary report of activities and findings. In order to promote international exposure, participants in the international REU program at CREOL will be invited to participate in many of the planned domestic REU activities (i.e. seminars, industrial site visits), including a joint poster session at the end of the program.
Recruitment efforts will focus on attracting women and minority participants who will be encouraged to pursue graduate studies in the field of optics and lasers.
Finally, in an effort to improve the quality of the REU program, a Program Review Committee, consisting of the Dean of the College of Optics and Photonics, the Dean of Undergraduate Studies, and the Chair of the Philosophy Department (Ethics), one senior and one junior CREOL faculty member, and the PIs will be formed to annually evaluate the quality of the students' experiences and the overall success of the REU site.
The 2009-2012 CREOL REU Program lasted 12 weeks in each summer, hosting a total of 36 undergraduates from across the U.S., drawn from a nationwide pool. Participants were matched with faculty mentors who directed their REU participant in an independent summer research project within their lab, alongside other existing CREOL graduate students and researchers. To supplement the research experience, REU participants were also given introductory courses in Lasers, Optics, Ethics, and Nanophotonics. To provide them a better perspective of the roles of researchers in the work force, multiple industrial site visits were done each summer, giving them a unique chance to have exposure to real world researchers, and an understanding of how advanced degrees impact typical job roles within industry. Our REU program had a goal of recruiting at least 50% members of groups underrepresented in the sciences. We exceeded this goal with an actual level of 61%, of whom 33% were minorities and 47% were women. At the end of the program, the participants wrote short (~10 page) reports and presented their results in a joint poster session with the CREOL International REU program. We found that many more faculty, graduate students, research staff, and even the non-technical staff of CREOL attend the poster session than formal talks, and this was much more satisfying for the REU students.
