Does anyone have any experience with the First Year Innovation and Research Experience Program at the University of Maryland? Good/Bad, Worth it? Thanks!
This seems like it was posted in the wrong place, but I can actually answer it from an engineering perspective as I am currently a first-year student at UMD majoring in mechanical engineering and I am also in the FIRE program.
So the thing about FIRE is that it seems geared mostly toward students who are interested in some sort of biological and/or social sciences. The options available for computer science and engineering majors are slightly limited.
The first semester of FIRE is just an introduction to what you will be doing in your later semesters. You will be doing activities such as data analysis, summarizing scholarly articles, and presenting data that you have found and have made conclusions about.
In the second semester, you actually get to choose a specific research stream that you will participate in. For me personally, the 3 that were most interesting were the Autonomous Unmanned Systems Stream, the Philips Virtual Culture Stream, and the Designing Innovations Stream. I am currently in the Autonomous Unmanned Systems Stream and I do not regret my choice one bit. I am working in a lab designing systems that will interact with the environment to solve some problem or do some task that has never been done before.
In conclusion, I can’t yet tell you whether the experience will be worth it, but I am enjoying what I am doing and looking forward to the remainder of this semester and my next semester in the program and what opportunities await.