Undergraduate Research Opportunities

MIT believes that the experience of research - formulating new ideas, collecting and assessing new data, pushing the boundaries of common knowledge - should be open to everyone, not just exalted senior scholars. Faculty bring their research results right into the classroom and in turn invite students to become directly involved in their labs.

From the minute you arrive at MIT, you can choose to plunge into real, frontline research (freshmen are encouraged to wait until after their fall term, however, to give themselves time to adjust to MIT). Undergraduates participate in research through something called UROP -- the Institute's ground-breaking Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. By the time they graduate, almost 85 percent of MIT students will have collaborated on and helped produce real, ground breaking research.

How real is it? Many students find their names appearing in published papers. A few even earn patents from it.

How deeply you dive into the world of research is entirely up to you. Some students are involved in UROP throughout the school year and even during the summer. Some commit to no more than a semester or two. Some opt to do no research at all.

If you are open to the idea, however, you will find research opportunities in virtually every area of academic endeavor, from technical fields like biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, to subjects like urban planning, management and Women's Studies.

You may choose to participate in research for pay or for credit, or simply as a volunteer. The credit you earn depends on the number of hours you commit.

Research at MIT

By the example of their own lives, a crucial part of what our faculty members teach is the "instinct" for first-class research: the disciplined curiosity, the irreverent creativity, the endless ability to persevere. At MIT, those skills and values are as much a part of the atmosphere as oxygen - just what you would expect from a place that routinely leads all US universities in patents granted. Our Technology Licensing Office has signed 50 to 75 option and license agreements every year for the past five years.

More recently, MIT research teams identified the site and nature of the gene defect responsible for myotonic dystrophy, the most common form of muscular dystrophy; fabricated a single-electron transistor; developed a new optical technique to measure galaxy distances with unprecedented accuracy and reliability; and developed a microchip that releases different chemicals on demand from tiny reservoirs built into its structure, a technology that has many potential uses in medicine and other fields. MIT researchers - including undergraduates - were also instrumental in completing the mapping of the human genome.

What we discover next could be up to you.