By: CHRISTINA CLARK
Staff Writer
clark66@umail.iu.edu
IU South Bend offers some substantial opportunities for those in the area who want a bachelor’s degree, but the other South Bend university—you know the one—offers some extra opportunities to IUSB students. And the Student Government Association (SGA) president wants you to know about them.
“For me, it was an invaluable experience,” said Stephen Salisbury, SGA president and editor in chief of the 2017 Undergraduate Research Journal, of the Computational Social Science Research Experiences for Undergrads (REU) program at the University of Notre Dame. “It fulfilled a lifelong dream of being a student at Notre Dame, even if it was just for 10 weeks,” he said.
Having participated in the program last year, Salisbury’s goal in promoting the opportunity is to “make students aware of these types of opportunities they should know about it.”
The Center for Research Computing has two different REUs available this summer at the University of Notre Dame. Data Intensive Scientific Computing (DISC) is for those majoring in computer science, physics, or biology. The other is the Computational Social Science REU for those majoring in computer science, psychology, economics, or sociology.
“These are both ten-week summer programs that begin May 22 and end July 2. Participants are provided on-campus housing, a $5,000 stipend, a meal card and travel support. Each participant is paired with a faculty mentor and research project for the 10 weeks and they are integrated into their research group,” Kaillie O’Connell, program contact at Notre Dame, said.
With the DISC REU program, students “will learn how to use high performance computing and big data technologies to enable new discoveries in computer science, physics and biology. We work on grand challenge problems, like discovering new galaxies in digital imagery, discovering new fundamental particles, using gene sequencing to understand disease, predicting the effect of new drugs using computational modeling and many more,” according to the DISC website.
With the Computational Social Science REU program, “students will work collaboratively with expert mentors and select from a wide variety of computational social science projects at the University of Notre Dame,” according to the website. “This REU training environment will develop multidisciplinary social scientists with the appropriate expertise to answer the computational social science data growth challenges and opportunities.”
“It gave me the chance to see what it would be like to work in a graduate environment at a top-tier research university like Notre Dame or IU Bloomington, or other national schools of that nature,” Salisbury said. “It helped me refine my goals as to the kind of graduate work I’d like to do and for what type of career in academia I might best be suited.”
