University of Minnesota REUMinneapolis, MNOfficial site: http://www.spa.umn.edu/outreach/reu/ Matt Landreman, Swarthmore College, 1999 The University of Minnesota's physics REU is a solid program. Your experience will depend to a large extent on the advisor you end up with, but the overall program is well-organized and the students are treated to a few nice perks. The program is run by a delightful gentleman from a prestigious scientific lineage named Hans Courant (ask him about his years working on the Manhattan Project). The REU is fairly large (about 15 undergraduates per summer), and many of the participants are actually U of MN students. A few students came from farther away (Berkeley, CalTech, Carleton, and Swarthmore among others my year). Your first few days will be spent knocking on doors trying to find an advisor who 1) is a good personality match, and 2) has work for an undergraduate to do. The quality of your academic experience varies from advisor to advisor, so spend some time making a careful decision. I ended up working on a very open-ended project where I had a lot of self-direction, but most people ended up with jobs in which the work was fairly and dried. Many students ended up doing the grunt work of data-taking or writing analysis code without feeling they really got to take a leadership role in their project. The summer concludes with a poster session in which you present your work to the other students; unfortunately, few faculty turned up for it however. There are a few activities to spice up the summer. A shop course for the REU students allows to you try your hand at a drill-press. Undergraduates are invited to a few talks as well. By far, the highlight of the program was a day trip to the Soudain underground mine in northern Minnesota. A hair-raising ride a half-mile down a claustrophobia-inducing elevator shaft brings you to a cavernous particle detector, buried deep underground to shield it from cosmic rays. Apparently the REU students sometimes get a weekend trip to Fermilab (near Chicago), but for reasons I can't remember we did not go our year. The location is definitely a plus for the Minnesota program. The neighborhood is dominated by the giant university and so is full of student-oriented restaurants and shops. The school's location right on the Mississippi provides convenient access to a fabulous biking/running/walking trail, and the campus and surrounding city is very bike-friendly. Downtown Minneapolis is quite close for shopping, great theatre, and more culinary delights. If you wish, you can stay in a university dorm room for the summer at no extra cost. Everyone in the program can eat at one of the dorm cafeterias on campus. The food isn't the greatest, but it's free. Many but not all of the students eat together here. Lunch is the only regular time you interact with your REU-mates, so there wasn't a lot of bonding. I mostly talked with the other student who worked in the same lab as me. This lack of interaction is perhaps my only reservation about the Minnesota program, which was otherwise a fun and worthwhile experience. |