UROP at Michigan

Hi,

I’m going to be an LSA freshman at Michigan next year, and I’m wondering how demanding UROP is. Online it says 6-12 hours/week, which doesn’t sound huge to me, since I’ve been involved in a bunch of time-consuming extracurriculars in high school. Is it possible to do UROP and still have a social life? (I’m premed and in the Honors program also).

Thanks!

It depends on your ability to manage time, the number of credits/mixture of classes you are taking, how much of a social life you want, and the research project you end up finding. If you want to take 18 credits, do UROP, & have a very active social life then it might be too much.

UROP requires a class workshop/meeting approx every other week, assignments for the workshop portion, plus the research you are doing. It’s an amazing program and my DS met an invaluable mentor through the UROP program. They worked on publishing a paper and he brought DS to give a talk to professors at another university on their research. The down side was that he put so much of his time into his research that his grades suffered. Poor management on his part, but he loved what he was researching and got carried away.

It really depends on what other extracurricular involvement you have (clubs, orgs, jobs, etc.), and also, to an extent, your research sponsor/mentor.