The Making of an Accessible Intensive Research Experience

An IRE is an Intensive Research Experience compressed into a small number of consecutive days, during which students receive highly-focused mentoring from practicing researchers. We describe our experience with two specific IREs at the HelloResearch workshop in 2018. Students in each IRE met as a group (of sizes 13 and 9, respectively) for nine research sessions, totaling about 14 contact hours, over three days. The participants were selected from a diverse (in terms of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status) group of female undergraduates attending Indiana University and schools across the country. We describe our experiences mentoring a blind student in the “Creating Custom Technology to Improve One's Quality of Life” project and a deaf student in the “Activity Recognition Through Deep Learning with Sound and Video” project. We share general lessons we learned about accessibility and announce plans for a second HelloResearch workshop in 2020.