There’s a place on campus at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa that helps undergraduate students across all disciplines engage in faculty-mentored research and creative work by providing programmatic and financial support.
Each year, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) provides approximately $500,000 to undergraduate students at UH Mānoa working with world-renowned faculty mentors on projects and professional presentations. In academic year 2018–19, UROP provided funding to 195 students from roughly 40 unique majors.
Searchable opportunity database now available
A new UROP resource is the Student Opportunity Center (SOC), a searchable database with thousands of online opportunity listings: research and creative work positions, internships, co-ops, conferences and more. Access is open to all undergraduate students, faculty and staff.
The SOC is comprised of two main databases: a national database of opportunities curated by using web-crawler technology to search the internet for thousands of listings, and a UH Mānoa-specific database. The SOC serves as a “one-stop-shop” for faculty-generated, on-campus opportunities.
Faculty can post their positions on the database, tagging listings by relevant majors, and students can use the database to search for listings. Students who subscribe to those specific majors will get notifications when a new listing is posted.
“Students frequently express that one of the major barriers to engaging in research and creative work is difficulty finding opportunities,” said Jessie Chen, UH Mānoa UROP program coordinator. “The Student Opportunity Center collates thousands of listings from numerous sources into one searchable database. Students are now able to browse thousands of opportunities at once, and even apply keyword searches or filters.”
More on UROP
UROP supports students with scholarship funding from UH Mānoa, programmatic support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and donor funding from the Harold K. L. Castle Foundation and Douglas S. Yamamura Scholarship. During its eight years of existence, UROP has distributed more than $2.5 million to more than 1,000 students.
Projects UROP students are working on include: studying the links between coffee and Type 2 diabetes risk factors, examining the impact of classical culture on Hawaiian society, and diagnosing nutrient deficiencies in Hawaiian breadfruit.
