CRA-W

CRA-W - CDC Broadening Participation Alliance
Widening the Research Pipeline

The Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC) have formed an alliance with the goal of implementing and evaluating programs to increase the participation of women and minorities in computing research.

Goals of the Alliance

Encourage talented undergraduates from underrepresented groups to apply to graduate school in CS&E and increase their chances of being admitted and obtaining financial support.
Strengthen the graduate school experience for students from underrepresented groups.
Develop better mentoring support for all students throughout their undergraduate and graduate education .

Alliance Projects

Discipline-Specific Mentoring Workshops With the goal of connecting senior and junior researchers and students within a specialty research area to provide discipline-specific mentoring, this program supports mentoring workshops in specific subdisciplines of CS&E.
Distinguished Lectureship Series With the goals of encouraging students to apply to graduate school and of providing an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to attend a lecture and talk with accomplished researchers from underrepresented groups, this program supports visiting academic and industrial lecturers and graduate school information panels at colleges and universities.
Undergraduate Mentoring. With the goal of providing and enhancing undergraduate mentoring programs, this effort supports individual and small team undergraduate mentoring programs, including:
- Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU): Students, typically in the summer before their junior or senior year, are paired with a faculty researcher and spend ten weeks at the faculty member's institution engaged in a computing research project.
- Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU): Teams of two or more students work with a faculty member at their home institution over the academic year on a research project. Multidisciplinary projects are also considered.
- Extended Mentoring Support: DREU or CREU participants are encouraged to enhance and extend their research experience. For example, participants may request funds to continue their summer DREU project under the mentorship of a local faculty member during the academic year, to continue to work on the project with their DREU mentor, perhaps meeting at technical conferences, to continue a CREU project over the summer, or to pursue a DREU mentorship after participating in CREU.

Sponsors: