Undergraduate Research & Internships

Research and internships can be done on a volunteer basis, for credit, or sometimes paid. There are even opportunities to obtain a research certificate and apply for research fellowships. 

RESEARCH

Research projects can vary in the time commitment they require. Before you begin searching for a project you need to understand how much time that you have to dedicate to a project. You can gain experience in labs in our Department or in labs throughout the University, including the Medical School and Dental School.

INTERNSHIPS

Internships provide hands-on experience in an area that interests you. In the past, our students have held internships at the Allegheny County Coroner's Office, UPMC, the Pittsburgh Zoo, the Carnegie Museum, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and Pitt’s Pathology Department.

FUNDING AWARDS

Our undergraduate students are recognized for their outstanding scholarship at the Department, University and national levels. A variety of competitive, merit-based fellowships and scholarships enable more students to focus on their research during the academic year and in the summer. In recent years, our upper division undergraduates have received prestigious scholarships by successfully competing with the best science students in the nation.

ABSTRACT WRITING

People use your abstract to understand your project and decide if they care to visit your poster or see your talk. They might be interested in the topic, results, or specific methods you used.  Thus, the abstract should briefly describe the big picture and goal of the research, question you investigated/hypothesis you tested, experiments you performed, results you obtained, and relevance of your findings.

POSTER

Before you even open Powerpoint or other poster making software, you want to plan out what you will show and sketch it on paper.  We start with the meat of the poster -your data- and work forward to your conclusions and the backwards to the background the audience needs to understand your work.