The Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) launched in November of 2023 and had a great first year of operations in 2024, supporting students and campus partners. Our goal this year was to effectively communicate our mission, vision, and values to the campus we serve and build the programmatic, academic, and infrastructural foundations that would allow us to scale and sustain our efforts in the years to come.

 

Our vision statement most captures the spirit of our unit: OUR sustains a vibrant heartbeat of welcoming campus-based undergraduate research community and opportunity. We seek to provide programs and services, open learning and course-based resources, and other forms of support that assist students of all backgrounds and levels of experience and campus partners.

Regarding our work with campus partners - we wish to be clear that while we consider it our mission to empower UMD students and campus partners through our programs, services, and courses, we also recognize that we're not the only game in town. Campus partners have long operated successful undergraduate research initiatives in many heterogeneous forms and sizes - programs, courses, structured research engagements with faculty, grant-based opportunities, etc. We hope that partners will see us as a centralized resource that is as dedicated to the success of their initiatives as our own.

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We are excited for the next year to come! We just launched ForagerOne and encourage students and campus partners to use this new resource dedicated to connecting undergraduate students and campus partners based on shared creative, research, and scholarly interests. We are running our first OURS courses in Spring 2025 and have calls for proposals to enable campus partners to integrate with existing and new OUR programs this year.

 

Sincerely,

Patrick/Patricia Killion

Director: Office of Undergraduate Research

Director: The First-Year Innovation & Research Experience