For Students - Frequently Asked Questions
UMD undergraduates can become involved in faculty-mentored research in a number of ways. Some students join a research program like the First-Year Innovation and Research Experience (FIRE) or Gemstone at the time they matriculate, but there are numerous other pathways to getting involved in research as a UMD undergraduate. Students may conduct research through participating in independent study and Vertically Integrated Projects (VIPs) courses, or they may complete a capstone or honors project. The university also offers a number of research programs during the summer months and academic year, including our office’s Immersive Research Internship Experience (IRIE) and Student-Proposed Innovation and Research Experience (SPIRE). In addition, many students get involved in research projects with individual faculty members by responding to listings in our ForagerOne database of research opportunities or contacting faculty independently. Beyond the UMD campus, UMD students also participate in research at other universities and at research institutes, government agencies, and private companies.
Additional Resources:
Our office provides listings of on- and off-campus research programs; visit our student support website and click on the “UMD Programs” and “Beyond UMD Resources” tabs.
For an in-depth discussion of pathways to research involvement, we suggest enrolling in our office’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Competencies (UROC) open learning resource.
As a first step, we recommend spending some time engaged in self-reflection about your motivations for getting involved in research. What do you want to learn? Are there particular subfields, questions, methods, and/or types of evidence or data that you’d like to explore? We would not recommend defining your goals narrowly, but it helps to have an initial sense of the types of opportunities you're looking for, as there may be dozens of researchers in your major field at UMD. You are also more likely to be a successful candidate for research opportunities if you can clearly articulate what your specific interests are and how they relate to a given faculty member’s work.
Once you have spent some time reflecting, the next step is to begin looking for opportunities; for some thoughts on the search process, please see our response to the next question below.
Additional Resources:
For more guidance on reflecting on your research interests, we suggest enrolling in our office’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Competencies (UROC) open learning resource.
Once you have a clear sense of your interests, we recommend searching for opportunities on our ForagerOne database as a first step. Faculty members and other campus researchers from all divisions of the university have the opportunity to share opportunities through this resource. Beyond ForagerOne, many students find opportunities through word of mouth; if you are interested in research in a given area, consider speaking with your course instructors in that area about your interest. They might not work with undergraduate researchers themselves, but they may be able to point you in the direction of other faculty who do or offer guidance based on their experiences working with other students interested in research. Similarly, it can be useful to speak with other students doing research in your area of interest about how they got involved; research-related student organizations and university events like Undergraduate Research Day and the Summer Undergraduate Research Conference can be a good way to meet students with whom you share intellectual interests. Finally, a number of students identify faculty doing work in their areas of interest by systematically working through the information available on departmental websites and reviewing faculty members’ research publications.
Regardless of how you initially develop a list of faculty members whose work interests you, we recommend that you spend some time in this phase of reviewing departmental websites and researchers’ publications before reaching out to faculty about opportunities. This process of exploration, which we discuss in greater detail in our response to the next question, can help to confirm your interest in a given researcher’s work and ensure you put your best foot forward when communicating with faculty members.
Additional Resources:
For additional guidance on identifying faculty members in your areas of interest, we suggest enrolling in our office’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Competencies (UROC) open learning resource.
Our office maintains a list of research-related student organizations; visit our Student Support site and click on the “UMD Orgs” tab.
Faculty members may share information about their research on personal, research group, and departmental websites, as well as in ForagerOne. Through such resources, you may be able to quickly find a good description of a faculty member’s current research and information on their academic publications. If you see a document provided on a faculty member’s website called a “CV” or “curriculum vitae,” definitely review it; an academic CV, which is somewhat analogous to a resume, will detail the faculty member’s academic history and list their publications. If you can’t find information about a given faculty member’s publications on a UMD website, Google Scholar can be a good resource for identifying a researcher’s published works.
Once you know the titles of a faculty member’s publications, the next step is to find and review a few of these publications. Bear in mind that publications discuss completed work and thus may have a different focus than a faculty member’s current projects. Still, publications, especially recent publications, can be indicative of the types of questions, theoretical approaches, methods, and evidence that a researcher finds most compelling, and researchers often build on their past work in current studies. In some cases, the full text of a given publication may be available via a faculty member’s website, the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM), or a publisher’s website as a free “open access” document; in others, you may need to search for the text of a publication in one of the academic research databases to which the UMD library subscribes.
Once you have tracked down a few publications, pick one and start reading. You will likely find at least some of it to be confusing and hard to follow; bear in mind that faculty typically write publications primarily for other experts in their field. Try to avoid getting hung up on what you don’t understand and focus on the big picture and your own curiosities: what is the main question or issue being addressed? What are the conclusions, and what methods and types of evidence did the researcher use to derive those conclusions? What aspects of the publication intrigue you? If you can get a good sense of the answers to these questions for a few recent publications, you will have prepared yourself well to compose an email to a faculty member about possible research opportunities and (if the opportunity presents itself) to have a conversation with them related to their research.
Additional Resources:
For additional guidance on reading research publications, we suggest enrolling in our office’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Competencies (UROC) open learning resource.
If you experience difficulties obtaining a given publication, we strongly encourage you to refer to the UMD library’s “Find Materials” site or to reach out to a librarian for assistance.
The way in which you initiate contact will depend somewhat on circumstances. If you find an opportunity with a faculty member on ForagerOne that interests you, please read through the entirety of the listing carefully. The faculty member may provide specific instructions for students interested in the opportunity; for instance, they may ask you to fill out a Google Form or send an email to their UMD account. You should adhere to any instructions provided. If the faculty member does not provide instructions, then you can reach out to them through ForagerOne as a default. We have instructions for contacting faculty through the site in our ForagerOne documentation for students. Similarly, if you find out about an opportunity through a listing published on a departmental website or shared via a departmental mailing list, you should carefully follow whatever instructions are provided. If there are no instructions, we would suggest sending an email to the faculty member’s UMD address as a default.
If you are approaching a faculty member about research opportunities who has not publicized a specific opportunity, you should consider the nature of your preexisting relationship, if any, with this faculty member. If you already know them well, you may wish to drop by their scheduled office hours for an informal chat. If you don’t know them or only know them slightly, we would recommend starting with an email. You could consider simply stopping by office hours in this case, too, but the difficulty is that they will have no knowledge of you or your academic background when you show up, which may make it less likely that they will be inclined to consider you as a candidate for research opportunities. That being said, faculty have diverse preferences, and some might actually prefer a visit during office hours from a student they don’t know. Regardless of how you ultimately choose to approach someone, what is most critical in any case is that you approach them in a professional, respectful manner.
For some further thoughts on writing emails to faculty, please see our response to the next question.
Additional Resources:
For additional guidance on how to contact faculty about research opportunities, we suggest enrolling in our office’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Competencies (UROC) open learning resource.
Your aim should be to write a professional, respectful email that is carefully tailored to the individual faculty member to whom you’re writing. (We have guidance on learning more about a faculty member’s research above.) Faculty members won’t expect you to know every research project they’ve ever conducted, but it can be very helpful to identify specific aspects of their research that interest you. For instance, do they study a question or problem that you find engaging? Is there a particular method or approach used in their research that you would like to learn? Being specific about what interests you helps to communicate that you’ve invested time in learning about their research and that you’re genuinely excited about it. You should avoid sending messages that sound generic and as if they could have been sent to many faculty members in the same department.
Your email should also be specific in its discussion of who you are. You should highlight your academic background and skills, including “transferable skills” relevant to research that you’ve acquired in non-research settings. If you have relevant prior research experiences, you should definitely highlight them, but don’t become discouraged if you don’t. Many faculty don’t regard prior research experience as a prerequisite to joining their research groups; commitment and a desire to learn may be far more important.
While we believe that specificity will make your message much stronger, the message should also be relatively succinct. Faculty members receive a lot of email, and you want to avoid sending someone a lengthy email that requires a considerable investment of time to read. The key here is to focus on sharing only the most essential information in your message.
Additional Resources:
Our office offers some additional guidance on this topic on our student support website; click on the “Contacting Faculty” tab.
For additional guidance on emailing faculty members about research opportunities, we suggest enrolling in our office’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Competencies (UROC) open learning resource.
If you have written a draft email to a faculty member and you would like to have us review it, come by our office hours!
Faculty members typically receive a large number of emails, so we recommend patience. If you wait 10-14 days and still haven’t received a reply, you could try sending a polite follow-up reiterating your interest in their work. If you don’t hear back after a follow-up message, we recommend focusing your energies on other potential opportunities.
Students participating in the First-Year Innovation and Research Experience (FIRE), Immersive Research Internship Experience (IRIE), and Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) programs are assigned to specific research groups associated with these programs; otherwise, our focus is not on directly matching students with individual researchers or research groups. Instead, we focus on sharing information about opportunities through ForagerOne and other resources, empowering students to identify potential opportunities, and helping students make the strongest possible case for themselves as candidates for research opportunities.
Yes! Please come by our drop-in office hours.