Summer Fellowships

The UReCA office exists to specifically support undergraduate students. The summer fellowship is available only to undergraduate students who will be enrolled full-time in the Fall 2024 semester. If you are graduating in that Fall semester, you are still eligible. Unfortunately, graduate students and graduating seniors are not eligible. If you are graduating in the semester before Summer UReCA, you will not be eligible. However, if you are  in this category, please explore our “opportunities” page for other options.

Applications and Letters of endorsement are found here: Dropbox. Submit all materials by 4 PM of the deadline date, March 1, 2024. All communications should go through the UReCA Office (ureca@ou.edu).

Your cover letter should feature your project or research title, accompanied by a 250-word abstract of your project. It should also include electronic or physical signatures from your mentor, your mentor's department chair or director, and yourself. Please avoid simply typing their names and including addresses.

Your chosen mentor, of course. Faculty or staff at OU or another from institution can provide a letter of recommendation. Any faculty, staff, post-doc, or teaching assistant familiar with your research and academic abilities.

Proposals should not exceed 4 pages in length. If all required criteria are met (please see guideline pdf), 2-3 pages may be sufficient.

Yes, you can. It is highly encouraged to work in a team or as part of an interdisciplinary team. However, the stipend is awarded directly to you. Once the stipend is deposited into your bursar account, you can choose to share it with your team members. Additionally, other team members can submit separate proposals that contribute to the collaborative project.

The Provost established this fellowship to enable students to focus exclusively on their research without the need for employment or other activities that could detract from their research efforts. While it's challenging to specify a set amount of time due to varying expectations, the funding provided should reflect the importance and scope of the research work. This should discuss these with your mentor. 

Research and creative activities are never done in a vacuum. A student research project will rely on the work of past scholars and collaboration with current practitioners. The idea for your project does not have to be original (although it could be). The project idea could come from your faculty mentor and be a project they have had in mind for some time. You should develop the ideas for your project by working with your faculty mentor and other faculty and interested persons. Use these people as resources for figuring out how you will approach your project (how to hone hypotheses, develop experimental or qualitative tests, decide on data to collect, and appropriate statistical or theoretical interpretive frameworks for analysis). This project is your project, not your faculty mentor's, so you do need to demonstrate how you led and conducted most of the effort. Questions about the appropriateness of a project or the degree of independence may be directed to the UReCA Office (ureca@ou.edu).

Quite often progress on a research project does not occur as quickly as one thought it would. This is the very nature of research; new questions are being asked, novel techniques or protocols are being developed and unforeseen problems occur. What is important is how you approach and deal with these difficulties. Since this is your research project, you should be suggesting or providing possible solutions to your mentor to surmount these problems. Also, when finished with the summer research, reflection on your research journey will be important in your final report.