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REU Site Program in Functional Materials
CU-Boulder
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SEMINAR SERIES
The REU Site Program includes a one-hour weekly seminar presented by faculty members and attended by all student participants. Emphasis is placed on how to do research, developing critical thinking, ethics in research, laboratory notebooks, troubleshooting equipment, problem solving, and searching for solutions. Many of these seminars use problems that are solved by the students individually or in groups. The seminar schedule includes the following:
- Introduction to Research (using the literature, becoming an expert, objectives, steps in a research project, expectations of student and advisor in research, time value of research)
- Laboratory Skills, Safety, and Lab Notebooks (experimental planning in lab notebooks, what data to record, how to record for patent rights, etc.)
- Critical Thinking (developing more than one hypothesis, not blindly accepting the literature, not confusing correlation and causation, false discoveries)
- Research Ethics and Fraud (being objective in research, bias in data acquisition, honesty in research, examples of research fraud)
- Laboratory Methods (what is expected from an experiment, control experiments, randomization of experiments, equipment calibration, analyzing data as they are taken, preliminary experiments, covering experimental range)
- Problem-Solving Techniques and Laboratory Troubleshooting (search techniques, how to systematically get equipment working, what assumptions are being made)
- Time Management & Organization (critical for research)
- Communication of Research Results (oral presentations, effective overheads and slides, poster presentations, LCD - PowerPoint” presentations, technical writing)
- Postgraduate Opportunities (graduate school)
- REU Student Poster Competition
The REU Student Poster Competition is a two-hour session, at the end of the program, in which the REU students present posters on their research to the department students and faculty. Each poster presentation is evaluated by a faculty panel and the evaluations are provided as feedback to the participants. For posters that are judged to be appropriate, the REU student is offered the opportunity to present his or her work at a technical meeting, within the coming year, at the expense of the department. Typically 3-4 students per year take advantage of this opportunity, and many of them have won awards at poster sessions of national meetings.
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A National Science Foundation
REU site program |
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