For Faculty

Becoming a Mentor

Mentoring students is an exciting and challenging endeavor. To help you in this process the OUR offers several resources.

The first of these is access to an excellent publication, 

Richards, Rosalie; Powell, Caitlin; Hammack, Jennifer; Mcmullen, Rebecca; Bacnik, Larry; Lewis, Robin; and Sams, Doreen,
"Mentoring Undergraduate Research" (2014). Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors (URACE). Paper 1.
http://kb.gcsu.edu/urace/1. This book discusses every aspect of mentoring Undergraduate Researchers, including strategies for managing workload and maximizing benefit for promotion, tenure, and professional development.

 

Finding students has never been easier with the new ScholarBridge Portal.

ScholarBridge creates one centralized, searchable database of faculty and their research activities on our campus. As a faculty member, you can easily manage a page that displays your basic background information, summarizes your research, and most importantly, filters whether or not you are currently interested in sponsoring/mentoring student candidates during the academic year, and/or as summer research assistants – you can always adjust these settings as circumstances change. ScholarBridge is built as a convenient management tool for you, and a great opportunity for outreach. The site has already been tested and reviewed positively by several of your peers across departmentsWe know that students on our campus are eager to use this sort of resource. We are excited to participate, and hopeful that this will serve our entire community in a meaningful way.

To make the process of joining as simple as possible, you have two options:

  1. You can go directly to the site: http://www.scholarbridge.com/ and follow the links to sign up as a professor. You will have to fill out your background information to complete your profile. This entire process should take you <10 minutes.
  2. Follow this link: http://www.scholarbridge.com/optin/  if you’d like to sign up quickly, but can’t devote the time right now to fully customizing your profile.  The team at ScholarBridge will pre-populate your page with your background information from publicly available sources (departmental websites, research websites, etc.). Within 3 days, you will receive an email from ScholarBridge notifying you that your account is ready. You can then edit your page and proceed to post research opportunities at a more convenient time.

Please feel free to reach out to either me at jstremblay@southalabama.edu or the folks at ScholarBridge (michael@scholarbridge.com)  with any questions or concerns.  Thank you for your continued contributions to our academic community!

Getting Support

As a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) Mentor, you and your students can benefit directly in 3 ways:

  1. $500 in research supplies to support your lab or creative activity.
    1. Once approved, we can order supplies for you, or you can pick out what you need and we can reimburse you.
  2. Free poster printing for the fall Undergraduate Symposium and conference posters where a current or former SURF student or Volunteer Intern is presenting, or you are presenting work with an OUR student as an author.
  3. Travel support
    1. Students may request up to $300 in travel support from the OUR.
    2. Students winning the OUR Outstanding Research Award and their mentors are flown at NO COST to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.