Researcher Dave Rusch remembers sitting up all night during the Sputnik era, watching for signs of Soviet satellites orbiting the earth over his boyhood home in Iowa. The dawn of the Space Age so stirred his imagination he built his own telescope a few years later.
"I remember saying to myself, 'Boy, wouldn't it be exciting to study data that came back from a satellite?' " said Rusch, a senior research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics, or LASP.
Now a respected researcher who relies on satellite data to study ephemeral clouds high above the Arctic Circle, Rusch is igniting the imaginations of a new generation of scientists eager to study the heavens. He and other faculty are advising two dozen of CU-Boulder's brightest incoming first-year students through the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, or SURE program, which runs from early July through early August.
Associated with the university's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or UROP, the program enables high school graduates to adjust gradually to college and work alongside professors who can help them synthesize their academic interests and home in on fields of study close to their hearts and minds.
Each year, campus administrators encourage top incoming freshmen - those who have a grade-point average of 3.75 or higher and a combined SAT score of 1350 - to apply for the program. Participants receive $1,000 stipends and free room and board. Previous participants serve as resident advisers over the summer.
Since its 1986 inception, UROP has provided more than $5 million to some 6,000 undergraduates for research and creative work. Many students continue work they began in SURE by applying for UROP grants. Some have written honors theses with work they began before their first year in SURE, said Joan Gabriele, director of undergraduate enrichment programs at CU-Boulder.
"As an offshoot of UROP, the SURE program provides an extraordinary transitional experience for the students," Gabriele said. "While many students learn the basics about their disciplines in their first couple of years and then formulate research interests, SURE students are in the unique position of learning about the discipline through research they conduct themselves - sometimes at a level only available to advanced undergraduate or graduate students."
This summer, participants are studying with faculty who teach journalism, mathematics, engineering in all its forms, psychology and pre-medicine, physics, biology, English, biochemistry and integrative physiology. For undergraduates, the opportunity to conduct real-world research at a major university is a breathtaking reward that follows years of dedicated scholarship and challenges that included peers who may have been less enthralled by math, physics and calculus.
"Thinking of physics problems is fun," said Kevin Fiedler, who will study engineering physics in the fall. "It's mentally stimulating, which sometimes doesn't happen in high school. Here, it's really cool. In SURE we could have a discussion about physics and everyone would understand. They've all taken AP physics. A lot of conversations I couldn't have in high school now happen on a daily basis."
Fiedler, 18, of Broomfield, Colo., has written a computer program to figure out the life cycles of polar mesospheric clouds - how they form, how long they last and why they inevitably die. He'll make predictions, create models and draw theories based on data transmitted from a satellite launched in April. The clouds have appeared brighter and at lower latitudes in recent years, and Fiedler wants to know if there is a correlation between these revelations and global climate change.
"He's right in the forefront of scientific research," Rusch said of his prot茅g茅e, who he said is interpreting satellite data with a fresh eye.
To learn more about SURE and LASP, go to . To download a podcast about SURE, go to .