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CAMP Program Provides Mentorship and Research Opportunities for Undergraduates

This summer marked the eighteenth year of the University of California CAMP (California Alliance for Minority Participation) program. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s LSAMP program, CAMP is a UC system-wide alliance dedicated to improving access and participation by underrepresented minority students in science, math and engineering fields. At UCSB, CAMP is administered by Dr. Julie Standish in the Materials Research Laboratory Education Office, under the direction of faculty PI Glenn Beltz, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Engineering.

2009 CAMP students

CAMP encourages student achievement through a variety of components, including summer and school year research opportunities, career building workshops and opportunities to present at national and regional meetings. This summer, ten UCSB undergraduates, ranging from sophomores to seniors, participated in mentored research projects through the CAMP program. In addition to research, participants practiced oral presentations, attended a weekly seminar series, participated in workshops on research ethics, laboratory safety, scientific writing and poster preparation, and presented their final results in a campus-wide poster colloquium. Said one student, “[CAMP] opened my eyes in learning new possible career options that I had never considered before and also motivated me to stay in the sciences.” Both continuing and new interns will participate in CAMP during the school year, and many of the continuing interns will take the opportunity to present their research at professional meetings. Last year, CAMP students presented at the national conferences of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the Society for the Advancement of Chicano and Native American Scholars (SACNAS), as well as at the Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Research (SCCUR) and the annual statewide CAMP symposium at UC Irvine, which featured student researchers from all nine UC campuses. The primary goal of the CAMP program is to encourage underrepresented minority students to continue on in science and mathematics to undergraduate and graduate degrees. Recent UCSB CAMP participants are currently enrolled in or have completed graduate degrees at CSU Los Angeles, Duke University, U C Irvine, U C Berkeley and UCSB. Of the CAMP experience, Sandra Roman, a fourth year biology major, said, “It made being a scientist a feasible goal.”

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