<p>How does one go about getting an undergrad research fellowship?</p>
<p>Usually they don’t?</p>
<p>If you are talking about getting research experience as an undergraduate (minus the fellowship part), then all you have to do is approach various professors at your home institution, and ask if you can work with them. Generally, this school year research is unpaid, although sometimes you can get an hourly wage, depending on the professor’s funding and your expected level of contribution.</p>
<p>For summer research, you can apply for REUs across the country; some pay generous stipends for their 8-10 week programs. You can also contact professors at your home institution to see whether you can work for them over the summer. If you live near another university, you can also contact professors there.</p>
<p>Some colleges offer research fellowships as merit scholarships to entice newly accepted applicants. These are rare, however, and generally cannot be acquired if you aren’t offered one at the time of admission.</p>
<p>Sources of funding:</p>
<ul>
<li>the professor you are working with</li>
<li>your home institution (my college has a number of summer stipends for students pursuing unpaid research or internships)</li>
<li>REUs and similar programs</li>
<li>national fellowships (the Goldwater fellowship is the only one that comes to mind for undergraduate students)</li>
</ul>
<p>I had an undergraduate research fellowship at my undergrad. If you are an underrepresented minority, most of the URFs (not the summer ones, but the academic-year ones) are for underrepresented minorities. NIMH-COR is one (for mental/public health research), MRBS-RISE is another, UMARC is another, and the Mellon Fellows program is yet another.</p>
<p>For all of these programs, they have to be present at your institution, and you usually apply at the end of your second year and are admitted to begin at the beginning of your junior year, and they last two years. They usually cover a portion (but not all) of your tuition and fees and give you a small stipend (mine was $913/month, but that was two years ago) for expenses.</p>
<p>They’re not exactly rare; they’re just present at certain institutions. NIMH-COR, for example, is only present at minority-serving institutions - certain universities and colleges with high numbers of underrepresented minority students. I went to an HBCU so my campus had all four of the above mentioned fellowships. You also can’t get any of them as a first-year student - for all of them you had to be a sophomore to apply (I think with Mellon you may be able to apply in your freshman year).</p>
<p>If you’re already in college then ask around your campus and see if they have one of those programs there (I think MBRS-RISE is the most popular/prevalent one). If you’re not yet in college when you visit the websites for the colleges in which you’re interested, search to see if they have one of those programs or something similar.</p>