Thank you very much for your article in the Sept. 1, 1997, issue of The Scientist concerning summer undergraduate research participation (SURP) programs [E. Russo, page 1]. Over the course of the past seven years, we have hosted more than 200 students on our campus as part of our own SURP program. We find that a very high percentage of these young men and women proceed on to graduate or professional schools, many at our own institution (nearly 20 percent on average).
We shamelessly admit that we use this program as a recruiting tool to attempt to convince the best and brightest undergraduates from across the nation to come to our campus as graduate students. Our program was in fact established for this purpose. As such a tool, we consider it to be a highly successful means for demonstrating to summer students that our graduate school, often overshadowed by our ...
