REU Activities within the ECE Department
The objectives of the programmatic activities are to:
- encourage interactions and provide an environment for collegial relationships between all REU students and faculty members
- expose the REU students to other specialization areas within ECE
- expose the students to the nature and responsibilities of relevant jobs in the real world
- increase the awareness of the REU students on the importance of diversity in engineering
The activities are:
Weekly REU meetings - The students will attend weekly meetings to discuss their projects in an informal setting. These meetings will be attended by a faculty moderator, who will encourage the students to participate in technical discussions on their research projects. The primary objective of these meetings will be to provide the students a safe environment for practicing communication skills and initiating collegial relationships while sharing their technical results. - Faculty – REU Meetings: Faculty members from different specialization areas will meet with the group of ECE-REU students to talk about the nature of scientific research in their fields. These meetings will also include laboratory tours to showcase motivating examples from ongoing research projects. The purpose of these meetings will be to provide valuable information about different ECE specialization areas and encourage student-faculty interactions. We believe that this is especially important for electrical and computer engineering students since the profession has witnessed an explosion in specialization areas during the last two decades.
- Industrial visits and seminars: Our brand new electrical and computer engineering building is located in the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University, which is referred to as the North Carolina State University's vision of the future. This “technopolis” consists of multi-disciplinary R&D neighborhoods with university, corporate, and government facilities intertwined. The campus includes many ECE related businesses including corporate giants such as ABB and Red Hat software. Furthermore, the research triangle park (RTP), only 30 minutes to NCSU, houses a large number of telecom, computer and biotechnology companies. The centennial campus and the close proximity of RTP tremendously increase the potential for useful interactions with the local industry. Capitalizing on this advantage, we plan to invite two guest speakers from local industrial research labs for seminars geared toward REU students and informal roundtable discussions about research in industry. One or both of these may also include visits to the industrial sites. These events will be open to all students from NSF REU programs at NC State, although they will be primarily targeted at Electrical and Computer engineers.
Seminars of “PURPOSE”: NCSU has an NSF grant for the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) to enhance the development of underrepresented minorities (URM) in science and engineering. In that program, success is defined in terms of URM student’s successful pursuit of doctoral degrees. Professor Christine S. Grant coordinates the Future Faculty Component of the NCSU AGEP and is the founder and director of the “Promoting Underrepresented Presence on Science and Engineering Faculties (PURPOSE) Institute”. Both of the aforementioned initiatives have as a goal the successful recruitment, promotion, retention and movement into leadership of URM faculty. The PURPOSE Institute is also focused on increasing the exposure of URM faculty outside of their home institutions, creating a unique dialog between the faculty, administrators, students (e.g., potential graduate students) on both cutting edge engineering science and diversity issues. The ECE REU program works with the PURPOSE Institute in sponsoring the “Symposium of PURPOSE” to introduce students and faculty to the technical expertise of a set of nationally recognized URM electrical engineering faculty.
Activities with summer research students in other departments:
NC State University has a well established campus wide undergraduate research organization, which organizes many exciting educational and social activities for students participating in the summer REU program in different colleges and departments. The students in the ECE-REU program will naturally take part in all of these merged activities as well. The following link includes the activities during Summer 2007.
Calendar of Activities - NCSU Summer Research Program - 2007