We are proud to announce that the REU program will be back in Summer 2024. Applications will become available on this website on December 1, 2023, and will be due February 19, 2024.
The Texas A&M Sociology Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) offers summer fellowships to do world class research.
This program was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant #1757813 for summers 2018, 2019 and 2021, and under grant #2244231 for summers 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Program Overview
Our REU Summer Institute “Research in Social Inequality and Social Problems” gives undergraduate students the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the patterns, nature, causes, and consequences of social disparities through hands-on participation in research projects supervised by leading faculty researchers. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation for the purpose of promoting undergraduate experiences in social science research.
Social disparities have been rising steadily for decades and in some areas now stand at extreme levels not seen since the “Gilded Age” of the late Nineteenth Century. Income inequality has been growing steadily for the past four decades, residential segregation by race and class stand at very high levels; vulnerable populations are differentially exposed to social problems; attainments of current generations in education, income, and social mobility will not exceed those seen for their parents’ generation; and past trends of steady gains in health and life expectancy have stalled.
Students in our program will gain the opportunity to be involved in research that documents the patterns and nature of social disparities and investigates its causes and consequences with the goal of identifying ways to arrest current trends and provide benefits more broadly across all groups, particularly the socially vulnerable. Students will be directly involved in faculty research projects and they will participate in an advanced seminar in social science research methods to improve skills documenting and analyzing social disparities. Students also will have the opportunity to learn about graduate training programs and careers in social science research to pursue their program interests in the long run.
Students will spend two months at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas working with and training under research mentors in sociology. They also will attend a professional conference to present their research results.
Students will receive a generous stipend and the program also covers costs for room and board, travel to and from College Station, travel costs for research field trips, and travel costs for conference attendance.
Our program especially encourages applications from students from under-represented groups and less-advantaged backgrounds (e.g., first-generation college students) in keeping with our program goal of helping promising students realize their full potential for a possible career in social science research.