Hey RU students — especially SUST majors and minors . . .

The annual Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has literally hundreds of PAID summer research fellowships in the US that you can search for and apply to. These are well-compensated and you learn a ton doing one of these fellowships as a rising junior or senior.

This REU database is searchable by geographic region, general research area, and keyword. When I did a simple search for “sustainability” I got 49 hits. Check it out!

If you’re wondering, “Have any recent SUST majors got one of these awesome fellowships?” — the answer is yes. Here’s a cool post by Kiera Carpenter (BA in SUST ’24) who completed one of these REUs at the Chgo Botanic Garden in the summer of 2023. And check out the video she made about her research:

Roots of Resilience: a Chicago Botanic Garden original video by Kiera Carpenter (2023)

And way back in summer 2012, SUST alum Allison Breeding (BA ’13) won a REU fellowship at SIU’s Center for Ecology and studied agroecology in beautiful Southern Illinois. She blogged about her experiences here and presented an overview of her research at the October 2013 Sustainability Studies Student Symposium.

And if you want to go way, way back in time . . . SUST prof Mike Bryson did two REU fellowships as an undergrad bio major, when this NSF program was a new thing: the first at the University of Michigan’s Biological Station (1988) and the second at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1989). He can attest that both were super fun and educationally invaluable!