Professional and personal development in research experiences for undergraduates

This paper describes how professional and personal development activities were incorporated into the first year of the NSF REU Site Grant, "Multiple Autonomous Mobile Robots for Search and Rescue Applications" (Quest). The REU targets women and minorities, populations which typically suffer from low self-confidence and esteem, limited teamwork skills, and a lack of understanding about the "rules of the game". This paper shows that these activities were relatively easy to arrange and administer, and did not appear to distract the students from learning more traditional technical and research skills. The evaluation of the first year indicates that the professional and personal development activities were at least as important to the future success of the students as the research exercises.