It is summer in Hyde Park.

The sun is low, the sky is golden, the pavement is happily reradiating all the infrared radiation it absorbed earlier. The interior of the Campus North Residential Commons, however, is shady and air-conditioned. A score of undergraduates spending their summer doing research have a date with their peers—and pizza.

This summer 55 students are taking part in the pilot year of the College’s Summer Research Residency program, which offers undergrads doing summer research a more formalized structure. The residency includes housing in North Campus—so the College students can meet others who are doing the same thing—as well as career-building events.

Tonight, for example, Andrew Karas, director and assistant dean of undergraduate research, is here is to give the undergrads some idea of how to make the most of their research days, this summer and in the future.

Now, one could argue that an event blessed with free pizza can never truly be judged to have gone wrong, but it seems the room’s HDMI cable has left for summer vacation. Not a problem; Karas pivots, telling the students the event will be less of a lecture and “more informal, more conversational.”

He starts with a quick poll: “What year are you?” (Most students are rising second-years.) “What field are you working in?” (Biological sciences takes the plurality, followed by physical sciences and social sciences.)

“Research is a social enterprise,” Karas says: Your success building a career as a researcher depends on your network of peers and mentors. “Make a conscious goal to build relationships over the summer” with the people you encounter, he advises.

Next comes the importance of the elevator pitch. He challenges the students to find an efficient way to address the questions What problem are you studying? What do you do day to day? What will answering this research question mean? He asks the students to practice on each other; they pair off, happy to have any excuse to describe their work. Nobody seems shy. Karas is impressed: “It’s clear to me you don’t need any tips on how to talk about your research with your peers.”

The summer has just started, but Karas advises the students to start thinking now about what comes next. Don’t just politely say, “Let’s keep in touch”—figure out ways to continue the relationship with your summer mentor, such as a wrap-up meeting and planned future check-ins. Just as important: Share the results of your summer projects, whether within the University at the Undergraduate Research Symposium in April (“All of you should present—do it!”) or at a professional conference—Karas’s office offers grants to defray the cost of attendance, he notes enticingly. Then there are competitive fellowships, such as the Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships: “I want you all to consider yourself candidates.”

Karas also suggests that the students direct some of their inquiry inward. There’s a “risk of hopping from experience to experience without taking time to reflect on it,” he says. “What were your initial hopes and goals? What did you learn about yourself? What are your goals for the rest of your time at the University of Chicago?”

There’s no one way undergraduates who want to participate in research come by it. They might respond to a posting on a bulletin board or a notice from an electronic mailing list. They might knock on doors in department offices and ask around, or tap into their network—former teachers, mentors, parents, friends of friends … whatever it takes.

They might do whatever it was I did—seriously, I no longer remember. One day I was an aimless physics major, and the next I was working for Donald G. York, PhD’71, the Horace B. Horton Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Enrico Fermi Institute. York had an army of undergraduates in his lab, but my cadre was focused on gathering clues about the diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs)—mysterious lines visible in the spectra of stars that appeared to be caused by an unknown substance or substances in interstellar space. I spent a year and a half working for York, probably the most fulfilling period of my entire College education. And given that only a tiny fraction of the DIBs have been explained in the intervening quarter century, there’s room for a lot of other students to find their bliss as well.

Although the program is called the Summer Research Residency, it’s not just for future scientists. The goal is to support students in “research and other forms of intellectual production,” as Melina Hale, PhD’98, dean of the College and the William Rainey Harper Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, terms it.

Summer housing is a big draw. And the residence hall has another advantage: a built-in community. “We love to see students meeting new friends and having support of peers who are also in research programs,” Hale says.

In addition to career events, the residency’s organizers have invited speakers from the sciences as well as from the arts and humanities. There are also purely social events, just like during the regular academic year.

The 55 students in the residency come from a variety of disciplines: biological sciences, sociology, and English, to name a few. There’s M’Kaia Trent, Class of 2026, who is screening a library of proteins for potential treatments for spinocerebellar ataxia type 6, a degenerative neurological disease. There’s Jack Getz, Class of 2027, and Jacob Felsenthal, Class of 2026, who are working with Katherine Buse, assistant professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, on a modification to the popular farming video game Stardew Valley. The mod, Stardew Valley: Big Ag, which Buse describes as “a critical degrowth mod for your favorite agricultural life simulator,” rewards players for doing less to promote agriculture, not more.

Mansha Nigam, Class of 2028, is spending her summer working with Richard Kron, professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and director of the Dark Energy Survey, to digitize century-old photographic plates of the heavens taken at Yerkes Observatory (built and long operated by UChicago, but now an independent institution) by Edwin Hubble, SB 1910, PhD 1917. Kron’s group is examining how the light from quasars—extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily distant galaxies—has varied over the intervening century by comparing Hubble’s plates to more modern digital images. “These plates are physical records of the sky from over a hundred years ago,” Nigam says, “and by digitizing and analyzing them, we’re both preserving that legacy and extracting valuable data.”

(As a side note, I lived at Yerkes for a year after graduation, and at one point proposed to the director that I try to digitize the plates in question. Unfortunately, at the time the observatory didn’t have a working scanner with high enough resolution, so I went back to measuring the DIBs for Don York. I was glad to hear someone eventually picked the project up, especially since with hindsight I can see I would have been in way over my head trying it solo.)

Nigam’s project isn’t just rote copying and pasting of digital files. To provide an accurate comparison of the new and old images, she first needed to model how light traveled through the optics of the original telescope, which took a fair bit of self-study. “It was a great surprise, though, because it gave me the chance to apply a lot of what I’d learned in my physics class last quarter in a real research setting.”

Olivia Kuang, Class of 2027, works on a variety of projects in economics. On the upside, she gets to connect theory to actual real-world human behavior: “I especially enjoy working with datasets from field experiments designed by our team. Analyzing those real-life results and drawing economic insights from them is both intellectually satisfying and practically meaningful.” On the downside: coding. Before starting this project, Kuang says, “I had very little exposure to coding, so it was all brand-new. But I pushed myself to pick up the skills I needed and, over time, I was able to independently write and execute code for our analyses.”

Kuang had already lined up her position when she learned about the residency. For her the biggest surprise of the summer has been the atmosphere created by working with her faculty mentor, John List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and the College. List is “incredibly approachable and open to everyone’s ideas and updates,” she says. “We even play song-guessing games during all our weekly meetings—this was something I never expected.”

Jiayi Wang (now AB’25), who double-majored in English and economics, is working with English professor Elaine Hadley on the historical causes of homelessness in Chicago. Wang’s research looks at both vacant houses and people experiencing homelessness—that is, homes without people and people without homes. She’s excited to explore the origins of the modern housing crisis, including “the possibility of uncovering overlooked narratives and connecting policy decisions to lived experiences on the ground.”

Staying on campus is a plus for Wang, who is working on her research while taking the last course she needs for her bachelor’s degree. This fall she starts a master’s degree in public policy at UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, which she plans to follow with law school. Her chosen specialty: “a focus on employment law and landlord-tenant law.”

Spending the summer in Campus North is a different experience from the more typical summer sublet (like the sweltering, dimly lit hovel I lived in one summer that smelled perpetually of natural gas and insecticide). “Some of my fondest memories have been made after research hours,” Nigam says. “Watching the NBA finals with friends over chocolate pancakes made by the RAs, hanging out on the 15th floor common room during weekends while snacking and catching up on work.” Campus in the summer is a new experience, too. Nigam tries to do her work in a different spot every day. The Logan Center for the Arts and the Kersten Physics Teaching Center are her favorites.

Kuang notes the collegiality of her residency neighbors. Whenever she has stopped by the study lounge in North, “there was almost always someone else there working, which created an encouraging and productive atmosphere,” she says. “Being surrounded by other motivated researchers helped me stay focused and energized on my own projects.” Another bonus: the slower summer pace of campus is “refreshing.”

Wang agrees that it’s motivating to know her neighbors are also focused on research. “That shared sense of purpose creates a quiet, focused atmosphere,” she says, “a space for serious academic work.”

The summer residency is Dean Hale’s initiative, and she’s deeply invested in it. But she’s a scientist first and foremost. That means treating the first year of the program as one data point in an experiment. “If it works out the way we think it will, I would love to see it grow and become just a regular expectation of the University in the summer,” she says.

And if Dean Hale could get a message back to the University administration in, say, the year 2002, so I could have a chance to participate, well, that would be great.

Read “Summer Research Residency Paves Way for Undergraduates to Learn by Doing” to learn more.