Curious about computing research? Want to learn what it means to "do research"? Planning on doing a senior thesis during the next academic year and want to develop your research skills this summer in preparation for working with your research advisor? Consider participating in the UR2PhD Pre-Research Experience Course (Pre-REC) this summer.
What is Pre-REC?
Pre-REC is an asynchronous course designed for undergraduate students who are not yet involved in research, but who are considering participating in a computing research project. You'll learn how to complete fundamental research activities, including reading technical research papers, finding related literature, and analyzing and visualizing data collected from experiments.
Pre-REC is being offered online as an asynchronous course during July and August 2025, giving you the flexibility to pace your learning over the summer. During the course, you will:
• watch brief videos that describe research concepts and tasks;
• apply those theoretical concepts to skill-building activities; and
• exercise your newly acquired research skills by analyzing two research papers and recreating parts of those papers.
One of Pre-REC's key components is that you'll "try out" research activities by recreating tasks from published research papers. Using Google Colabs written in Python, you'll recreate a paper's data collection, analysis, and visualization components and have the chance to create new experiments and analyses not presented in the paper. Research papers explored during the course are from fields including natural language processing and computational biology.
Optional weekly discussion sessions will enable you to have your questions answered and to chat with a computing researcher about topics including:
• How did you get involved in research?
• What does the process of taking a research idea to a published research paper actually look like?
• What sort of research careers exist?
To participate in Pre-REC, you need to:
• Be an undergraduate student enrolled at a North American institution of higher education
• Be willing and able to complete the course during the July 7 through August 31 timeframe
• Complete this form by July 1
The Pre-REC webpage can be found at https://cra.org/ur2phd/for-undergraduate-students/pre-research-experience-course/
If you have any questions about Pre-REC, please reach out to ur2phd@cra.org.