Assignment 6: Find connections

Before you begin

• Attend the undergraduate student panel, read the summary from Week 6, and/or read student stories on the SPARC webpage.

Description

In this assignment you will try to find out more about the people who might help you find an undergraduate research position or answer questions you have about undergraduate research. The assignment has two separate parts. 

Part 1

• Choose a faculty member or lab that you are interested in joining as an undergraduate researcher. This could be an Allen School or UW lab that you could join sometime in the future, or a lab at another institution that you would be interested in doing summer research at. Your assignment is to get a better understanding of who the people in the lab are, whether undergrads are involved in research, and how the lab operates. Try to answer the following questions:

  • Who are the currently active faculty, postdocs, PhD students, MSc students, undergraduate students, and staff in the lab?

  • Who are the graduate students working on the topics that you are most interested in?

  • Does the lab have a process for hiring undergraduate students? What does it involve?

  • Do undergraduate students participate as authors on papers?

  • What skills might be most useful to contribute to research in this lab?

• You can gather this information in several ways:

  • Do some private investigator work, looking at the lab webpage, lab members' personal webpages, and their list of papers.

  • See if the lab is listed in the finding undergraduate research page.

  • Talk to current students from the lab. You might get an opportunity to meet them through the student panel or the research night event happening this week. You could also get in touch with them via email. Remember to be courteous, polite, and on-topic.

• Submit all your findings from your investigation citing your sources of information.

Part 2

• Share something new you learned from the undergraduate researcher panel that was helpful to you given where you are in terms of deciding whether to pursue undergraduate research, what area of CSE to pursue, and how to pursue it. If you did not attend the panel or you did not learn anything from the panel (or you're interested in learning more), read student stories on the SPARC webpage until you find an answer.

Submission

This assignment is due on November 10, 2025 Monday 11:59pm. Submit your answers on GradeScope here.