4

Preparing and Motivating Students for PhDs in Computing

This chapter considers the roles of research awareness, participation in undergraduate computing research, and mentoring in encouraging students to consider doctoral degrees and preparing them for a career in research. It also considers how both existing and potential new initiatives in these areas can help boost domestic participation in doctoral programs in computing. There is no one-size-fits-all solution—targeted interventions are needed to address specific information gaps and appropriate interventions may differ based on program size, prestige, institution type, and resource availability.

BUILDING RESEARCH AWARENESS, ADVISING, AND EXPOSURE

Although there has been growth in doctoral degrees in computing over the past decade, there remains a large number of domestic students who might have pursued a PhD in computing if they had been exposed to computing research, careers in computing research, and information about graduate school earlier in their academic journey.

Awareness of Research Opportunities and Careers

Undergraduates often have limited knowledge about research, graduate study, and research careers, information that is important for attracting students to doctoral studies.

Indeed, many students have some misconceptions about doctoral studies and the opportunities that result, when in fact,

• Nearly all students receive financial support in the form of stipends and tuition waivers for their doctoral studies;
• Industry careers and doctoral studies are not mutually exclusive—a doctoral degree affords opportunities to engage in long-term, high-impact research in industry or government as well as academia; and
• Admission to highly ranked PhD programs is very competitive, and applicants are often expected to demonstrate research experience as well as possess a high grade point average in computing courses or high test scores.

Students also face complicated choices about what and where to study, and what type of program to attend. For one, a student with an undergraduate computing degree has multiple PhD program options, including computer science, computer engineering, computer science and engineering, and information science as well as a broad range of interdisciplinary programs such as computational biology and digital humanities. Aligning one’s research and career goals with the appropriate programs can be challenging.

Students must also select a specific institution and type of degree. For example, how does one select a school that matches one’s academic background and career interests? How much does it matter whether one attends a top-ranked school? Should one first apply to a master’s program and then switch to a PhD program? Is a professional master’s degree good preparation for a PhD?

More information and better messaging by computing departments, especially at teaching-focused, primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs), regional universities, and community colleges, would be an important step in allaying misunderstandings and addressing misconceptions. Importantly, the delivery mode must be scalable in order to reach students in both small and very large programs, and it needs to be compatible with the communications preferences of today’s students.

Computing departments at research-focused institutions, where faculty are expected to advise and graduate doctoral students, generally have activities and resources for undergraduates to learn about research and graduate school options, although these may not be broadly available to all students. Some of the activities may be specifically targeted at students in honors classes or those taking graduate-level courses. In other departments, activities are often less structured and coordinated. Unfortunately, very few departments teach about research and graduate school options until near the end of their undergraduate studies, at which point it may be too late for interested students to get involved in research or other activities relevant to admission into a PhD program. More detailed and specific information about graduate academic and research career pathways is especially important for first-generation college students, who are likely to be much less familiar with pathways to graduate school than other students.

In many cases, materials containing the needed information already exist. For example, the Computing Research Association’s (CRA’s) Student Pathways into Research in Computing website provides guidance and student stories to help students and mentors navigate through computing research. Professional societies, associations, and alliances, such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society, and CRA, can create additional materials for departments to use. Additionally, departments can take advantage of a variety of established programs that expose students to research or provide virtual mentorship, including Google’s CS Research Mentorship Program, University of Maryland’s Tech + Research, CRA’s Undergraduate Research to PhD (UR2PhD) program, or the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI) local Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

Research Exposure and Advising

Exposure to research in computing, through coursework, dedicated courses, or research seminars, can provide access for students who were otherwise unaware of research opportunities or context for how research fits into their larger career goals. Although students are aware that faculty members teach, not all are aware that many faculty also conduct research. Except for students with family members or family friends with doctoral degrees, most students are unaware of what it means to do research, whether they might be interested in research, or what research opportunities exist for students. Exposure to research helps bridge these gaps.

One way departments can create this exposure is by having presentations from current undergraduate peers or doctoral students who have participated in research, faculty members interested in having students work on their research, and department alumni or individuals from industry and government who have earned or are earning a graduate degree—to provide context for the opportunities and challenges of attending graduate school. These presentations should include components that talk about a speaker’s research path and career choices as well as graduate study. Students interested in participating in research experiences could be strongly encouraged, or required if they are receiving course credit, to attend some number of these sessions as part of their research experiences. Departments could host an ACM Distinguished Lecture Speaker or encourage students to attend regional ACM-W Celebrations, which often have financial support available for attendees.

Another way that students learn more about computing research is through interactions with researchers in academic, industry, and government. Institutions can create intentional opportunities for interaction through panels, interactions with graduate

students from partner PhD-granting institutions, other events, and visits to research laboratories—and incentivize student participation by awarding extra credit.

Another possibility for enhancing student understanding of research is to integrate research themes into the curriculum or develop a separate research methods course, similar to that developed by the CRA UR2PhD program. The integration could be achieved by incorporating discovery-based laboratory modules centered on experiments, comparative analysis, research methods, or problem-solving coursework. Such coursework can include hands-on research problems related to social good, which is critical for motivating the value of research. Additionally, opportunities to reflect on what was learned from researching a problem can motivate students to seek research opportunities (Kuh 2008).

Expanding Pathways at Non-Research-Focused Institutions

For departments that do not have a strong research culture or do not have funding available to support research activities, different strategies may be needed to create or increase student interest in independent explorations and engagement in research. When creating assignments or projects, faculty members should consider designing projects that involve more advanced topics and interesting data sets and include relevant references to videos or papers from the research community in the assignment descriptions. This allows students to explore problems and ideas further on their own and can lead to students building research skills and research interest. In upper-level elective courses, faculty members can create group projects that have a research bent and require students to engage with technical research in some way (e.g., research and implement several approaches to a problem). Additionally, faculty members overseeing students completing capstone requirements or teaching software practicum courses could encourage students to implement more advanced and new research techniques. The impact of these activities can be further enhanced by requiring students to present their projects to peers (Bangera and Brownell 2014).

Departments can also develop extra-curricular relationships and activities to foster research engagement. If there is a neighboring university with a research focus, departments should be encouraged to create connections between the two schools, both to give undergraduate students exposure to research and graduate school and to create a pipeline of students into the research-focused school (Box 4-1). Faculty, postdocs, and graduate students from the research-focused institution could be asked to give presentations in classes about their research as well as about research careers and graduate school. Postdocs and graduate students at the research-focused institution could virtually mentor small groups of undergraduates on research projects while undergraduate students obtain course credit at their local institution; this could create a pathway for

students to apply to and enroll in graduate studies at the research-focused institution after their college graduation.

Another example of a cross-institutional effort to increase representation of domestic students in graduate studies is the CAHSI partnership with Google that established an Institutional Research Program (IRP). The focus of the CAHSI-Google IRP is to pair faculty and students from doctoral-granting institutions with those from non-doctoral-granting institutions to conduct research in areas of interest to Google. The project funds 10 research awards each year for 3 years. The first set of awards was granted in fall 2023. Early results show that the effort is meeting its objective of building research capacity at non-PhD-granting institutions through its ideation workshops, initiatives for refinement, consolidations, and improvement through constructive feedback, and initiatives to build cross-institutional research collaborations (Rivera et al. 2023).

To increase the preparation and competitiveness of students for national undergraduate research experience programs, departments can create research experience

preparation and similar experiences at scale, with open access, so that students develop an understanding of research and gain a sense of belonging in research. The Accelerate program offered by the Computing Talent Initiative is an example of such an effort to guide students from community colleges and regional public universities through the research experience application process combined with preparation for a technology internship. For example, some success has been seen in getting community college students—who would otherwise not have heard about or received support for undergraduate research—into a research program.

EXPANDING RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES FOR UNDERGRADUATES

As many undergraduate students are unaware of what research is and what possibilities exist with respect to graduate study and research careers, engaging undergraduate students in a research experience is instrumental in getting them to consider pursuing a PhD. Participants in undergraduate research are twice as likely to apply to computing PhD programs and more likely to be accepted than students with no formal research experience (Tamer 2021; Wright 2020). Undergraduate research serves many purposes, including obtaining deeper understanding of subject material, clarification of interest in computing careers, professional development, building confidence and science communication skills, increased internship and job opportunities, and preparation for graduate school (Barker 2009; Russell et al. 2007; Sharma et al. 2022). Especially for students at non-research focused institutions, active engagement in a research culture opens pathways for students to explore graduate school and research career options (NASEM 2017). Consequently, an important pathway into computing graduate programs is participation in research as an undergraduate student.

National programs offering paid undergraduate research experiences exist that enable students to engage in research at an institution other than their home institution. Many of these programs were developed to target students from PUIs, regional universities, community colleges, and other non-research-focused institutions to give students the opportunity to work in a research environment that is unavailable to them during the academic year. Some examples of national programs include the following:

• The National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) REU program supports active participation of undergraduate students in research areas funded by NSF through two mechanisms: (1) REU sites provide funding to principal investigators (PIs) who create summer research experiences for 8–12 students at their institution on a topic related to faculty members’ expertise (e.g., cloud computing

• security and privacy); (2) REU supplements are included as a component of NSF grant awards and allow PIs to request research internship funding for up to two students each year for each grant. Notably, due to grant restrictions and citizenship requirements, international undergraduate students are typically prohibited from engaging in these REU programs.
• The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program provides students with paid opportunities to work with researchers at national laboratories on a research project.
• CRA’s Committee on Widening Participation’s (CRA-WP’s) Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) program matches students and faculty members from across the country for paid summer research internships at faculty members’ institutions.
• CAHSI’s Local Research Experiences for Undergraduates (LREU) program engages students and faculty at their home institutions in undergraduate research and is specifically designed to support students who may be limited to local programming by familial or financial obligation.
• Some academic institutions have established summer research programs open to students from across the country to engage in paid summer research internships with faculty members at those institutions, including Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and Purdue University, the University of Michigan Summer Research Opportunity Program, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Summer Research Program.
• Although not as common, industry internships engaging undergraduates in research also exist. Google’s Student Training in Engineering Program provides research experiences for first- and second-year undergraduate students in computer science. Microsoft’s Undergraduate Research Internship provides late-stage undergraduate students the opportunity to work on research with Microsoft researchers and doctoral interns for a paid 12-week summer experience.

Many different types of research experiences are available to undergraduate students, but only a limited number of each opportunity exists. These experiences range from formal to informal or local (at one’s home institution) to national programs that require relocation, and take place during a semester or over the summer. While this wide variety of programs allows for many different pathways into research, each opportunity has separate barriers to participation that students may face as they navigate their way into research. These opportunities and related limitations are discussed in detail below.

Limited Availability of Research Opportunities

On a national level, the number of research opportunities for undergraduate students is relatively small, given the large number of students majoring in the computing field. Despite the recent increase in undergraduate enrollment, it has not been accompanied by an increase in capacity for undergraduate research opportunities. Since 2019, NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) funding for REU sites has remained relatively consistent, with an uptick over the past 3 years reaching a peak of 129 sites for fiscal year (FY) 2023. Over this time, CISE REU sites and other programs, such as REU supplements or funding for undergraduate students in original NSF awards, have supported an average of 2,687 students annually, but has been decreasing year-over-year since 2020.¹ Although it appears that only a small fraction of undergraduates have access to such opportunities, which has been exacerbated by the growth in the number of computing majors, availability of data on number of applicants to these programs varies significantly across programs. Notably, due to recent funding cuts and program uncertainty, there has been a significant decrease in the already limited number of NSF REU opportunities available (Mervis 2025).

There is an insufficient number of undergraduate research experiences, given the demand for undergraduate research in computer science and computing-related fields as well as utility for increasing interest among target populations. For example, Carnegie Mellon University’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Software Engineering Program received more than 778 applications for their 2023 summer research internships, however the program had capacity for only 52 participants.² Expansion of these opportunities is essential, including to a broader set of students, to prepare undergraduate students for graduate level-research and address the increased demand for doctoral degrees in computing.

National research programs, such as NSF’s computer science and cybersecurity REU sites, DOE’s SULI program, and CRA-WP’s DREU program, all possess a limited number of positions. Individual academic institutions where faculty members are expected to engage in research may provide opportunities for their undergraduate students but are often limited by funding and faculty bandwidth due to existing obligations to train graduate students. Additionally, faculty members in departments experiencing increased undergraduate enrollments and larger class sizes are likely to have reduced research with undergraduates. This recent surge in student-to-faculty ratios may cause faculty advising to become an even larger bottleneck for student access to research opportunities.

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¹ Gregory Hager, National Science Foundation, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, personal communication, October 18, 2024.

² Josh Sunshine, Carnegie Mellon University, Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Software Engineering Program, personal communication, February 29, 2024.

One challenge to increasing the number of available research opportunities is funding. For students to receive a stipend or hourly wage, faculty must obtain funding through grants or institutional programs. For example, NSF’s REU Supplement program allows PIs to request research internship funding for up to two undergraduate researchers per year per grant. Alternatively, some institutions offer in-house funding for summer research opportunities, with the total funding often shared across several departments or the entire institution. During the academic year, students may receive course credit or be paid hourly wages for working on research; however, faculty members often must obtain funding for these paid opportunities.

Another hurdle for increasing undergraduate research opportunities is the lack of professional benefit for the overseeing faculty member with respect to research production, compensation, and career promotion (Alvarado et al. 2020; Sharma et al. 2022). The strain on already limited faculty time and bandwidth, frequent turnover of undergraduate researchers, and the slower time to completion of research tasks by undergraduate students compared to faculty or graduate students are all limiting factors in hiring an undergraduate researcher. Engaging undergraduates in research is not generally perceived to increase a faculty member’s research productivity. Consequently, faculty members may be willing to mentor only a small number of most advanced or top undergraduate students on research. In addition, supervising undergraduate research may have limited benefits with respect to tenure and promotion as it can be viewed as service or volunteer work.

With respect to compensation, very few academic institutions provide financial incentives for faculty members to mentor undergraduate researchers. Obtaining salary funds to advise undergraduate research can be challenging; for example, NSF indicates that up to 1 month of salary distributed to the PIs for an REU site is deemed the norm, even though REU site management and oversight lasts several months. To incentivize faculty to participate as mentors for undergraduate researchers, their institutions or departments could supply financial compensation, either in the form of salary or resources; reward faculty members for mentoring undergraduate researchers during tenure and promotion evaluation; or potentially require some level of undergraduate research engagement by faculty members.

To reduce the strain on undergraduate research opportunities, several interventions have been employed to lower the effort required by faculty and improve research experiences for undergraduate students. First, by developing a research methods course or integrating research methods into current coursework, computing departments can educate students about basic research practices, such as how to read a technical paper, how to perform a literature review, and introductory skills required to perform research tasks. By centrally educating students on these topics, individual faculty members do not

have to invest their limited time on this general research training. CRA’s recently created national virtual research mentoring program, UR2PhD, provides a research methods course, informational programming about research careers and graduate school, and graduate student mentor training. Another mechanism to increase the number of research opportunities could be development of collaborative research projects for undergraduate students, rather than focusing efforts on working with individual students (Ur 2023), such as that supported by the University of Chicago SUPERgroup and the University of Maryland Breakerspace.

Barriers to Undergraduate Research Involvement

In addition to the small supply of research opportunities, there is a high barrier to entry from the student perspective—students both must be aware that research opportunities exist and must understand how to find and apply for the opportunities that do exist. For students who become aware of research opportunities, the process of finding and applying for these opportunities can be challenging due to the distributed nature of undergraduate research programs and the lack of centralized application processes in most computing departments. Additionally, national programs often expect students to already be interested in research, have a basic understanding of research methods, and dedicate substantial time and effort to create a quality application. At the institutional level, students must independently seek out meetings with individual faculty members to learn about their research and inquire about opportunities in their research laboratories. In many cases, research opportunities will only be open to students who have advanced beyond introductory and core course requirements for a computing major. Students who seek out opportunities early in their college career may be dissuaded from seeking out research opportunities due to early rejections based on their limited experience. Given the limited number of research opportunities, even advanced students who are highly qualified may be rejected due to a high degree of competition, potentially discouraging them from reapplying in later years.

One approach to lowering this barrier is simplifying the application process for undergraduate research opportunities, especially within a single department. Centralizing the recruiting and application process for undergraduate research opportunities could include well-advertised information sessions about departmental research experiences and application process, including setting reasonable expectations for the competitiveness of the available positions. For example, guiding first- and second-year students to apply for research experiences tailored for their level of expertise can increase the probability of acceptance. It is also important that the application process not be arduous for students to complete or for students to be required to have very specialized or advanced experience for consideration.

Low or no compensation for engagement in a research experience also can be a barrier for participation, especially for students who rely on summer internship income to pay tuition bills or engage in work-study programs during the year for guaranteed income (Kelly 2023). Often, research is only accessible for students with no pressing financial needs. Some students will not be able to pay for a course credit devoted solely to doing research, especially if that credit does not count toward their degree requirements. For other students, being paid for doing research during the academic year may result in hourly wages that are lower than standard service-sector hourly wages, depending on the academic institution and the state minimum wage. For example, the minimum hourly wage at Target is $15 (Lewis 2022), but institutions may choose to pay students their state’s minimum wage (e.g., Virginia has a state minimum hourly wage of $12), to distribute limited funds available to as many students as possible.

The maximum payment students can earn during summer research internships is typically set by funding agencies who support undergraduate research, although many institutions may not allow faculty members to obtain the maximum funding from a grant agency. In 2023, NSF indicated that $700 per week (i.e., an hourly wage of $17.50) is the expected stipend for students participating in REU sites or employed via REU supplements, with some additional funds allowed for relocation, travel, and housing (NSF 2023). DOE’s SULI program pays students $650 per week (i.e., an hourly wage of $16.25), with additional funds for travel and housing (DOE 2024). The CRA-WP DREU program pays students $700 per week (i.e., an hourly wage of $17.50) (CRA 2025). In contrast, national computing companies such as Google and Microsoft pay software engineering summer interns hourly wages of greater than $40; in some cases, providing additional funds for housing and relocation costs as well as signing bonuses.³ For lower-income students, these tech internships can be hard to get, and opting to do a research internship instead of an industry internship requires a huge financial loss (Singer 2023). In many cases, students are hindered by the inability to move, sometimes across the country, for a summer research experience because relocation, travel, and housing costs can be a limiting factor.

Impact of Quality Mentoring Experiences

The benefits that accrue to students from a research experience, particularly the preparation and interest in graduate study and research, depends greatly on the quality of the experiences and mentoring that students receive (Barker 2009). However, the practice of impactful, positive, undergraduate research mentoring is time consuming for faculty advisors designing authentic research problems for students to engage in with well-defined

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³ See the levels.fyi website at https://www.levels.fyi.

subgoals; providing regular interactions with student researchers to explain terminology, techniques, research goals, and scientific norms and to foster skill development; providing advice about coursework, graduate school, and scientific careers; and providing personal encouragement (Shanahan et al. 2015; Thiry and Laursen 2011). Research has shown that undergraduate researchers are often advised by a postdoc or graduate student in a research group because faculty time is limited, receiving little interaction with or mentoring by the faculty member. However, postdocs and graduate students may not be trained, or have experience, in mentoring students on research, decreasing the likelihood that the undergraduate researcher will experience high-quality mentoring. Additionally, because faculty members may frequently only employ one or two undergraduate researchers at any time, students may also miss out on the benefits of peer mentoring.

Mentoring is an important part of the research process and can be the difference between a rewarding research experience and one that discourages interest in research. It is important that undergraduate students who are engaged in research engage with members of the research team, including faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and peers who can provide feedback to the student and meaningful evaluation in any future recommendation letters. Consequently, it is important that mentoring structures are deployed to ensure that the student receives feedback and support from a variety of sources. For example, in a Vertically Integrated Projects Program, students engage in activities to support and engage in research over multiple years; however, given the size of research teams, the designers of the program take care to support mentors so that they can be sure that students have research experiences with all of the benefits. To reduce the time commitment required of faculty and best prepare other research team members for a mentoring role, departments are encouraged to provide mentoring training for graduate students and postdocs, giving other research team members the opportunity to develop valuable soft skills.

Given that conference attendance has been shown to increase retention of individuals in computing (Wright and Tamer 2019), ACM’s special interest groups (SIGs) could be encouraged to create undergraduate research workshops in conjunction with their major conferences where students can learn about research in that field, learn about graduate school and research career opportunities, present their research via poster sessions, and network with and be mentored by graduate students and faculty members (Box 4-2).

Companies in the computing industry also have a role in expanding the domestic computing research landscape and encouraging undergraduate students to pursue research and graduate careers. Individual companies can provide more summer undergraduate research opportunities in addition to software development internships.

They can also provide financial resources to enable student participation in research opportunities in academia. For example, they can provide resources to faculty members to create research workshops or research activities; Google’s exploreCSR program is one example approach for providing resources to have programming created by members of academia. Additionally, companies could provide funding to supplement the summer research experience stipends provided by academic institutions so as to enable students with lower socioeconomic status to participate in research internships without forgoing the large salaries offered by software development opportunities; the Last Mile Education Fund piloted one such program in 2022. Finally, companies can also enable their employees with PhDs to engage with students in a research mentoring capacity, potentially partnering with researchers at nearby schools to provide additional mentoring

support for faculty and students and to share their own research career journeys to inspire and inform current students; the Google CS Research Mentorship Program is one such example of industry professionals mentoring research students.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Recommendation 3: Research funders, computing departments, professional societies and organizations, and industry should take actions to increase the number of undergraduate students aware of and exposed to research, participating in research experiences, and pursuing research careers in computing.

Recommendation 3-1: Computing departments at colleges and universities, and computing professional societies and organizations, should enhance and coordinate efforts to provide more and better information to undergraduate students about the nature of computing research, undergraduate research opportunities, skills needed for success in research, and the availability of financial support for graduate study in computing.

Recommendation 3-2: Research institutions (doctoral-granting computing departments and computing companies) and teaching-focused institutions (primarily undergraduate institutions, regional universities, and community colleges) should establish partnerships to enhance undergraduates’ awareness of computing research and doctoral study opportunities.

Such partnerships can provide undergraduate students with more information about computing research opportunities, exposure to computing research conducted at partner institutions, and coaching on the admission process, and financial support to facilitate pathways into computing doctoral programs. Successful partnerships could help both computing departments and companies identify and recruit domestic talent.

Recommendation 3-3: Computing undergraduate research programs and computing departments should increase the number of research opportunities and provide sufficient funding and other support to expand student and faculty involvement in undergraduate research experiences.

To achieve these outcomes, it would be necessary for the funding for undergraduate research experiences to be significantly expanded across institution types, not limited to research at doctoral-granting institutions, or introduce creative solutions that are more accessible to a wider range of students or that can reach more students at lower cost, including but not limited to online, self-paced, or group-based research.

Recommendation 3-4: Industry partners should not only expand research-intensive internships and offer other opportunities for industry research but also consider expanding support for undergraduate research programs at academic institutions.

Recommendation 3-5: Programs funding undergraduate research experiences in computing should require participating institutions to report on the number of students applying and acceptance rates to gauge demand.