ACCESS candidates

Your application is reviewed by SCEC staff and forwarded to potential mentors. Often SCEC will contact you for follow-up interviews by telephone or in person. To assess your likelihood of success in an ACCESS internship, and to match you to the right mentor and project, we will need to get to know you.

The ACCESS program is too new to have applicant statistics. Currently, ACCESS has funding to support up to 5 undergraduate and 4 graduate interns per year.

ACCESS accepts applications year-round. Generally, applications should be reviewed:

• for undergraduates, at least 4 months before the desired internship start date;
• for graduates considering MS programs, at least 6 months before the desired internship start date;
• for graduates already enrolled in an MS program, at least 2 months before the desired internship start date.

SURE and USEIT Applicants

Each year, approximately 120 students apply to SURE and/or USEIT. Of these:

• 15-22 students are accepted in USEIT;
• 3-30 students are accepted in SURE, depending on availability of project funding and suitable students.

Our overriding goal is to provide excellent research experiences to as many promising applicants as possible. If our selection process seems lengthy and complicated, it is due to that overriding goal. We hate turning away promising researchers!!

Every application is reviewed by a small committee composed of SCEC staff, scientists, and internship alumni. Applications are rated for suitability to both the SURE and USEIT internship programs. Even if you did not apply to a particular program, we may rate you as a good candidate for it!

For every SURE project, 3-8 candidates are selected as finalists. Some candidates may become finalists on more than one project. The project mentor then reviews the applications and ranks those 3-8 candidates. We make an offer to the candidate who is ranked most highly by the mentor. The next 1-3 candidates become alternates.

You will only receive one offer from us, but we put our alternates on a waiting list for as many projects as is reasonable.

For USEIT, 15-40 students are selected as finalists. Then the finalists are ranked a second time, based on our need to bring a diverse mix of talents and knowledge onto each USEIT team. The top 15-20 students receive offers. The remainder are designated alternates.

If you are an alternate, don’t give up. There are several ways that an alternate can wind up getting an offer:

• when a candidate receives an offer, he/she has about two weeks to decide whether to accept. If the candidate declines, an alternate gets an offer;
• sometimes additional funding materializes and we can make additional offers;
• successful USEIT interns who want to return to USEIT have places reserved for them until later in the spring; sometimes they relinquish these places and an alternate then gets an offer.