(375p) Developing an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) to Improve Students’ Professional and Research Skills

Many engineering students in the UK do not get real exposure to scientific research until the last year of their undergraduate degree or during their Master’s degree. This means it will be difficult for them to know whether they would like to pursue a PhD or research career until very late and PhD deadlines have closed. In addition, the research offered during their degrees are often not very challenging projects offering little novelty and no chance of being a co-author of a publication. Similarly, many students do not have contacts in industry or possess the skills needed to get a position.

Therefore, Imperial College has introduced something called an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme, a 10-12 week summer programme open to undergraduates from any year, where the students get to work together with a research group on a real, often industrial research topic. Students can apply for a stipend similar to what they would receive if taking up an internship in industry to support them while doing their UROP.

Seeing the success at Imperial College, I opened up this programme to students from other universities that did not offer the same opportunities for their undergraduates. In order to alert students about the opportunity I contacted various departments at different universities in London and the interest was overwhelming. In order to promote teamwork and collaboration between disciplines, a team of students from a diverse range of educational backgrounds were selected. In addition, to promote equality and diversity, the gender balance and ethnicity were also taken into consideration to give applicants an equal opportunity.

The cohort of students started the first few days with research and safety inductions. Afterwards, the students had to solve a number of problems in teams, both experimental as well as computational, which were closely related to their research projects and present their findings. This was where the importance of different educational background was crucial - they had to help each other in order to successfully solve the problems. After the initial training, they started on their individual research projects, many of them in collaboration with industry, which often involved updates and presentations to the sponsor. During the duration of the programme they had to give presentations to a variety of audiences as well as submitting short update reports and finally journal paper draft.

Many of the previous UROP participants have had their research published as well as continued careers in related fields, both as PhD students and R&D Scientists in industry. Past participants have often kept in contact with our research group over the years and told us about how useful their experience was, which proved that the programme was successful in giving the students both the relevant professional and research skills.