Mentors: submit your project

Helpful tips for submitting your project

Write for the first-year students who are the majority of URS Scholars. They choose their preferred projects based on the text you submit. Some of the form fields:

Project title (max 300 characters)

Project description (max 2000 characters)

• What should students know about your research or creative practice?
• What question is your work trying to answer?
• What should students know about your research or creative practice environment?

Keywords: two or three keywords each from…

• the project title,
• description, and
• tasks,
• plus any other significant words not in that text to help students search for projects that match their interests.

Required qualifications

• Use these qualifications to help students understand the skills or experiences they must have before working on your project.
• You can answer “None” if you are willing to teach your students everything they’ll need to know. URS students and staff greatly appreciate this flexibility.
• Clear required qualifications help students understand if they are a good fit for your project.
• URS Scholars are first- and second-year students; this is usually their first college-level research experience.
  • “must have successfully completed CHEM 103 or equivalent” = some students will have an AP Chemistry equivalent that qualifies.
  • “must have successfully completed CHEM 345” = students will not meet this requirement, because this is an Intermediate course.
  • Required qualifications can also be logistical, as in “Must be available for rehearsals from 4 to 5 pm every Friday.”
  • Projects with many required qualifications often receive fewer interested students.

Preferred qualifications

• Think of completing this sentence, “It would be helpful if the student…”
  • Example: “…speaks conversational Spanish.“ Not mandatory, but nice to have.
  • This would be a “required qualification” if speaking conversational Spanish is essential for working on your project.

In-person and remote/virtual tasks and responsibilities

• Describe what students will do on a day-to-day basis when they are working on your project.
• These sections help students answer the question: what will I actually do? What skills will I build during this project?
• See examples listed on this page.

How many incoming URS Scholars can you accommodate?

• Please hold these places for new students in the URS program until September 15, 2025.
• Interested students will contact you before then.
• You may request as many URS Scholars as will be able to meaningfully contribute to your work.

We welcome research or creative practice projects from any UW–Madison academic department or program.

Mentors can be faculty, staff, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate students who have earned a Master’s degree or equivalent.

• arts: visual art, music, dance, theatre, art history, etc.
• biological sciences: bacteriology, genetics, integrated biology, neurobiology, animal sciences, etc.
• business and marketing
• communication: communication arts, journalism, life sciences communication, communication sciences and disorders, etc.
• computer sciences and mathematics
• data science, information science, and statistics
• education
• engineering
• environmental sciences: botany, ecology, limnology, forest and wildlife ecology, soil and environmental sciences, etc.
• humanities: history, literature, philosophy, etc.
• languages and linguistics
• medicine and public health
• physical sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, etc.
• public affairs: political science, economics, international studies, law, etc.
• social sciences: psychology, social work, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, etc.

URS Scholars benefit from collaborating with you at any stage in your project’s development. Students enjoy collecting and analyzing data, of course, but joining you in your scholarship in any phase can be a great learning experience.

Still refining your question or hypothesis? Great! Undergraduate students rarely get to be part of that process. Have you finished collecting data and are looking for help with analysis or communicating your findings? We likely have Scholars who would be eager to help you!

All submitted projects are accepted. We may contact you for clarification or suggestions, but there is no URS review process to approve or reject projects.

Expectations for mentors

1. Hold spots in your project for incoming URS Scholars until September 15.
2. Respond to URS Scholars when they contact you about interviews; make time for those meetings.
3. Select your URS Scholar(s) and let them know they’ve been selected to work with you.
4. Schedule a time to discuss and fill out your Scholar-Mentor Contract together by October 8.
5. Create an list of onboarding tasks: required trainings, literature to read, team members they should meet with, etc., to help students get started on your project. Share this outline with your Scholar.
6. Reflect on your own academic mentors who helped you find your path. Support and connect with your Scholar in similar, or better, ways.
7. Meet with your URS Scholar regularly—maybe a half-hour each week? Use this time to give them feedback on their work, talk through any problems or roadblocks that may be coming up, share next steps, and invite them to ask questions.
8. Let URS Director Hannah Bailey know about any problems, including if the hours of work per week changes from the original contract. You can let her know about any exciting developments in your work too!
9. Review and approve your URS Scholar’s project title, abstract, and presentation materials for the Undergraduate Symposium in April.
10. Submit a grade recommendation each term, for each student, by the grading deadline.

Examples of tasks for first- and second-year students

These examples of tasks from past projects can help you see how URS Scholars might fit into your project.

• Archival research at Mills Music Library, Wisconsin Historical Society, and other relevant campus library locations
• Completing scans, book retrieval, and other administrative tasks
• Building bibliographies, researching visual elements, organizing digital files, corresponding with project managers
• Reading academic articles and primary sources
• Pipetting, sterile technique, cell culture, DNA/RNA isolation, sample preparation, microscopy, image analysis
• Rat surgery
• Reading scientific papers, working with DNA sequencing software, analyzing experimental data
• Data entry into database, chart review in electronic health record
• Data search, data cleaning techniques, sustainability analysis, technoeconomic analysis
• Completing introductory readings on the topic, preparing to present relevant examples and proofs to the group during in-person meetings.
• Python/R coding, data analysis
• Attendance at community events (e.g. health fair), contact research participants over the phone, perform interviews or focus groups with participants
• Attend in-person lab meetings, observe and then help out in participant sessions, perform quality control checks on the neuroimaging data (i.,e., look through brain images and apply developing knowledge of neurobiology knowledge to identify potential errors in the brain images), and enter data from assessments into an Excel file.
• Conduct at least three oral histories and/or semi-structured interview(s) on lived experiences, political engagement, and media habits.
• Data entry and cataloging, metadata tagging, preliminary analysis, thematic coding and annotation
• Listen to audio records to check for word accuracy, read and summarize papers, data management.
• Data entry, digital source collection, Zoom consultation when needed.