The UPERSS program provides opportunities for undergraduate Social Sciences students to work closely with faculty (or an advanced graduate student) to do research, creative work, or a community-based project.
How UPERSS Works
Students enroll in SS 3090 Exploring Undergrad Research in Social Sciences for between 1-3 credits. Students earn 1 unit of academic credit for every 3 hours worked per week (limited to a total of 3 credits per semester). UPERSS is open to all Social Sciences undergraduate majors who have a GPA of 2.5 or higher. Still, in order to be placed on a project, students must apply and be accepted by the respective faculty mentor.
UPERSS students share an overview of their research experiences at the annual Social Sciences Undergraduate Research Symposium (date TBD). Alternatively, students can fulfill this requirement by creating a well-developed poster, website, or visual representation of the project, or sharing a 4-5 minute recorded presentation of the project. Other options, such as co-authoring an article in a journal, presenting to a class, or presenting at a conference could also work. All decisions on this requirement should be made with the faculty mentor.
Learning Objectives
- Communicate effectively through writing, speech, and visual information
- Develop critical thinking skills
- Develop teamwork and accountability skills
- Practice presenting results and conclusions of the research
Getting Started
The first step is to review the project descriptions below and weigh decisions on time commitments and how well the opportunities match your interests. You might also approach a faculty member you know is doing research that interests you, even if they don't have a project listed here, to inquire whether they would be open to doing a UPERSS project with you. You’re encouraged to reach out to mentors for any projects that you are interested in to learn more.
Application Process
To ensure consideration, the application deadline for Fall 2024 courses is Friday, April 12, 2024.
Applications should be emailed directly to the faculty mentor. They should include:
- Resume
- Cover Letter. Letter should be a professionally-written statement that includes: academic, personal, and/or career interests, any research experiences or courses to date; and how participation in this UPERSS project aligns with interests and goals
The faculty mentor will review and contact you. They may wish to schedule an interview. If you are accepted/approved, your faculty mentor will contact the Social Sciences administrator to sign you up for the course.
Fall 2024 Projects
Currently available projects and faculty mentor—scroll down for full descriptions
- Historic Cemeteries: Mapping, Management, and Memory (T. Scarlett)
- Energy Infrastructure in Post Mining Communities (T. Scarlett)
- Public Value in the Global South (Wellstead)
- Treasure in trash? Aluminum, landfills, and communities in America (Robins)
- Financing Local Food: the Keweenaw Coop and Community Capital (Robins)
- Refugee Integration in Greater Detroit (Hannum)
- 3D Modeling of Antique Scientific Instruments (Walton)
- Poverty and Law: Legal Services for Northern Michigan (Peters)
Research Project Descriptions
Historic Cemetaries: Mapping, Management, and Memory (Fall 2024)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tim Scarlett
Project Description
Help Copper Country community organizations with their legacy cemeteries. Community organizations have asked us to help with mapping and remote sensing, geospatial visualization, planning for sustainable management, enhanced protection, and potential public interpretation of neglected cemeteries. Students might use tools like Ground Penetrating Radar and other remote sensing and mapping technologies, or perhaps focus on archival and/or oral history research. Each project helps digitize inventories of burial grounds and build management tools. Through a review of published literature on cemetery archaeology and management, provide recommendations on best practices for community organizations and municipalities for a problem facing many rural towns in the United States. Help to build connections between the cemetery inventory and online geospatial research tools, like FindAGrave.com and Ancestry.com, with an eye to building a robust management tool, facilitating heritage building/place making among local and the online communities of the "Copper Country Diaspora," creating useful interpretive material, and enhancing heritage tourism development in these communities.
Potential Benefits
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Student team members can choose which parts of the project to undertake, so commitments of time and tasks can vary. Projects will dovetail with other student classes, individual skill learning choices, and career plans. They may therefore place more emphasis on remote sensing and geospatial technologies; community-engaged or collaborative study; development of web resources, tools, or data structures; archival and/or oral history work; or heritage tourism, policy and management planning, or educational program development.
Student Time and Commitment
- Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week
Contact
Timothy Scarlett
- Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology
- scarlett@mtu.edu
- 906-487-2359
Energy Infrastructure in Post Mining Communities (Fall 2024)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tim Scarlett
Project Description
Individuals or groups working in this UPERSS course will fill a critical role in the PUSH research collaborations: talking to people in post-mining communities around the country about the energy transition. Building on work by previous student teams that mapped out energy infrastructure and mining heritage in different geographic areas, the goal is to find potential community collaborators in different types of places: Urban and rural, arid vs. temperate vs. subtropical, mountains vs. lowlands, places of economic growth vs. poverty or stagnation, private vs. public vs. Tribal lands, low vs. high environmental contamination, and so on. Team members will research potential sites, contact community partners in these regions, and make initial assessments about their suitability and interest in collaborations.
Potential Benefits
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Students will get experience researching in both "big data" and focused, ethnographic-style studies, although the specific skills will derive from specific studies in each location. Students then start at the "ground floor" co-designing participatory studies of past and present energy infrastructure in a place in order to form inclusive and just plans for energy futures. planning, or educational program development.
Student Time and Commitment
- Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week
Contact
Timothy Scarlett
- Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology
- scarlett@mtu.edu
- 906-487-2359
Public Value in the Global South (Fall 2024)
Mentors: Drs. Adam Wellstead, Anat Gofen (Hebrew University - Jerusalem), Saba Hinrichs-Krapels (Delft University of Technology)
Project Description
Over the past decade, policy innovation labs (PILs) have become important policy actors. This is the case in the Global South. PILs play an important role in creating public value.
See: Wellstead, A.M., Ottenhof, N., Evans, B. and Gofen, A., 2023. What's going on in there? Canadian government policy labs and public value management. Canadian Public Administration, 66(4), pp.514-532. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/capa.12548
This project will investigate how Global South based PILs contribute to public value.
Potential Benefits
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Develop career-oriented research skills
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Work with faculty members outside of Michigan Tech
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Learn about policymaking in the Global South
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Be included as an author on a peer-reviewed article
Student Time and Commitment
- Negotiable
Contact
Adam Wellstead
- Professor of Public Policy, Social Sciences
- awellste@mtu.edu
- 906-487-2115
Treasure in the trash? Aluminum, landfills, and communities in America (Fall 2024)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Robins
Project Description
This project is part of a Depart of Energy-sponsored investigation of the feasibility recovering aluminum through landfill (https://www.netl.doe.gov/project-information?p=FE0032236). Join an interdisciplinary team working on uncovering how aluminum got into consumer products, how those products wound up in landfills, how much might be buried, and what we might be able to do about it. Student research opportunities include historical investigations of the aluminum industry and landfill sites, studies of policy at local, state, and federal levels, and evaluations of landfill-adjacent communities with an emphasis on environmental justice issues. All majors welcome to apply.
Potential Benefits
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Learn how to identify, access, and interpret records from business, government, and other sources
- Practice communication and collaboration skills with an interdisciplinary team
- Contribute to published research
- Further opportunities with MTU Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Senior Capstone Projects or Senior Design Team, and paid summer research positions.
Student Time and Commitment
- Option to take for 1-3 credits, with hours corresponding 3-9 hours/week
Contact
Jonathan Robins
- Associate Professor of History
- jrobins@mtu.edu
- 906-487-3080
Financing Local Food: the Keweenaw Coop and Community Capital (Fall 2024)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Robins
Project Description
In 2024, the Keweenaw Co-op will be moving to a new building, thanks to a campaign to raise more than $1 million in investment from the community the Co-op serves. Since its founding in 1973, the Co-op has relied on investment from community members to provide grocery services, including a growing effort to sell more locally-grown food. Students working on this project will develop a case study of the Co-op and its fundraising campaign for the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), an organization that promotes local investment in local businesses.
Potential Benefits
- Experience in: archival research; oral history and interviewing; business history; writing for broad audiences. Learn more about: national, regional, and community food systems; sustainable business practices
Student Time and Commitment
- Option to take for 2-3 credits, with hours corresponding 6-9 hours/week
Contact
Jonathan Robins
- Associate Professor of History
- jrobins@mtu.edu
- 906-487-3080
Refugee Integration in Greater Detroit (Fall 2024)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kathryn Hannum
Project Description
What are the critical factors for successful refugee integration? How are refugee integration services and policies working in the greater metro Detroit area? Students will work on a multi-method, team science project that aims to answer some of these questions. Students will assist with coding qualitative data collected from interviews with refugee populations in SE Michigan. Coding will be done in NVivo software with the assistance of a pre-determined codebook. We will then analyze themes and patterns while comparing findings to refugee integration literature.
Potential Benefits
- Learn the qualitative interview coding process.
- Learn how to use NVivo software.
- Learn about key theories related to refugee integration.
- Learn key aspects of participatory action research
Student Time and Commitment
- 1 - 3 credits (equal to 3 to 9 hours per week)
Contact
Kathryn Hannum
- Assistant Teaching Professor
- Coordinator of Student Programs
- Policy and Community Development Program Advisor
- khannum@mtu.edu
- 906-487-2824
3D Modeling of Antique Scientific Instruments (Fall 2024)
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Steven Walton
Project Description
A mid-18th century inventor left four diagrams for a navigational instrument he called the "Plato(s)meter," but they have lost their full descriptions. We can understand them more effectively if we can build a replica, and today that means modeling it in 3D software and then 3D printing it to figure out exactly how it works. This UPERSS seeks a student reasonably conversant in some form of 3D modeling software (probably Fusion 360˚, but please help me know what would be best for this!) to take these four drawings, the limited textual description that accompanies them, and build the Platosmeter in digital space. We'll then print and assemble it and learn about how to navigate like it was 1760 (or at least how one inventor thought it could be done!).
Benefits to students
- Use digital tools to answer real historical research question
- Develop your 3D modeling software skills
- Develop your visual interpretation skills with haptic and intellectual validation considerations
- Be included as an author on a peer-reviewed article
Credits and Time Commitment
1cr.; 1 hour per week meeting + 2-3 hours work; 1 hr. weekly meeting
Contact
Steven Walton
- Associate Professor of History
- sawalton@mtu.edu
- 906-487-3272
Poverty and Law: Legal Services for Northern Michigan
Faculty Mentor: Susanna Peters
Project Description
Northern Michigan Legal Services has an office in Houghton and serves only low income residents seeking help with evictions, custody, guardianships, unlawful termination, medical insurance, and wide array of critical services. Selected students will be working with Legal Services Attorney and the faculty mentor to assist the staff and clients in a variety of ways and will also go to court hearings when available. It is difficult for low income residents to obtain legal help locally as the UP is considered a "legal desert", and lawyers are both scarce and expensive. Therefore finding ways for non- attorneys to effectively assist residents is one of the goals of this projects. Students in the project will be on the front lines of helping to determine what is possible for the future.
Benefits to students
For students who are interested in issues surrounding rural poverty and law working with this clientele will give them both experience and practical understanding of the issues facing the rural poor.
Credits and Time Commitment
2 or 3 credits: 4 or 6 hours in Legal Services Office space per week during the weekdays. (Times tba with staff attorney and mentor), meetings and written work can be done off site. Weekly reflections and short paper at the culmination of the semester to be agreed with by faculty mentor. Meetings every other week or every week as needed.
Susanna Peters
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Social Sciences Program Advisor
- University Ombuds
- speters@mtu.edu
- 906-487-2391
Program Contact
Steven Walton
- Associate Professor of History
- sawalton@mtu.edu
- 906-487-3272