Understanding How Summer Research Experiences Can Foster Diversity In Computing Research

When I worked for the CRA Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP), I had the opportunity to conduct applied research examining the effect of undergraduate research experiences on computing students’ preparation and aspirations for graduate school. This report is the culmination of a project I led where we evaluated whether participation in a summer undergraduate research experience (SURE) increased women and underrepresented racial minorities’ (e.g., African American, Black, Latinx) interests and intentions to remain in computing.

Using a propensity-score matching procedure, we first assessed whether SURE participation is differentially associated with greater intentions to pursue computing research in the future for underrepresented vs. well-represented students in computing fields. We then examined a set of common SURE characteristics, and their relationship with underrepresented vs. well-represented students’ intentions to persist in computing research.