Online Team Listings

The VIP Program is designed to serve all students, and online listings are a key component in student accessibility.  At most institutions, students usually get involved in undergraduate research by approaching faculty or by being approached by faculty, which substantially limits access and further marginalizes some students (students are intimidated, don’t think the programs are meant at them).  By listing all VIP projects online, proactively recruiting students, and having a low-stress application, we greatly increase student access to the program.

Georgia Tech has a Drupal webpage, and is happy to share the site (free of charge) with interested programs.  The site is hosted on a GT-provided server, and they pay an external designer/vendor to manage security patches.  (Patches sometimes affect the site, so the vendor fixes these problems as they arise.)

The VIP team at Stony Brook University also developed a system they are willing to share with other sites.  In their system, prospective faculty fill out the team information sheet online.  Once the VIP Director approves the sheet, the system generates a webpage for the team.  (Georgia Tech uses a Word file for the team information sheet and then manually setup the webpage.)

Information Sessions

Information sessions can take a variety of shapes – pizza lunch, poster session, booth in the student center, etc.  Formats vary by site and program size.  Small programs often hold pizza information sessions.  The small size allows each team to give a short presentation.  As your program grows, these sessions will get too long!  At this stage you can transition to poster information sessions.  This allows students to talk to the teams in which they are interested, and to come/go as they please.  We suggest providing teams with a poster template, which is essentially the team information sheet in poster format.  For VIP programs in early stages, student employees might be engaged to create these team-info-sheet-posters.  As programs grow, this becomes harder to handle, so you may want to just provide new instructors and existing teams with the template.

Information sessions should coincide with student registration periods.  Georgia Tech tries to hold its session the week before registration begins, when students are thinking about what classes they want to take next semester.  Additionally, VIP@GT found that minority student enrollment increased when they started timing information sessions in this way.

Email Campaign

Information sessions give you a focal point for your email campaign.  Even if the session isn’t well attended, the email campaign will bring students to your webpage.  Many departments have email lists, but the keepers of these lists may be unwilling to send emails on your behalf (at least semester after semester).  In other cases, they may include VIP announcements in an email newsletter that students don't actually read.  To work around this, you may want to build your own email lists every semester.

Send Emails by Major:  Georgia Tech found that a generic email, “Dear Georgia Tech Students,” yielded lower attendance and fewer applications than emails to specific majors, “Dear Computer Science Students.”  While it takes a bit of time, they always do email campaigns in this way.  If you want sophomores and up, remember to filter out 1st semester freshmen.

Explain what VIP is: Even if you’ve operated for multiple semesters, do not assume that students know what VIP is, or that they read your email last semester.  When GT did not explain what the program was, we saw our minority student enrollment drop.

Include a Call to Action: Be clear in what you’re asking students to do (attend the information session, visit the webpage, etc.).

Below is an email template that has worked well for VIP@GT.  The blue text is modified for each email blast by major.  The red text is updated with dates and times.  The hanging indents and bold text make the calls to action stand out.