"Thinking Like a Cohort": Managing an REU for Interdisciplinarity, Inclusion, and Inauguration of Young Scholars' Communities

Among the goals for all REU programs are broadening participation by individuals from diverse backgrounds and authentic engagement with the scholarly community. To help attain these goals, we advocate for managing REU programs with explicit consideration of student cohorts, rather than just individual students and their experiences. Echoing Aldo Leopold's classic paradigm shift to "think like a mountain," we espouse an REU management philosophy to "think like a cohort" that extends to all processes including applications, student selection, mentor recruitment, program structure, research topic formulation, program assessment, and post-program engagement. We share our experiences (successes and failures) of this approach in directing an international REU program that spans three colleges and five departments at a large university. Specific practices include: crafting a holistic approach to ensure diversity across a multitude of factors, actively engaging students in the application and selection process, building peer-to-peer interdependencies among research projects, formulating cross-disciplinary mentoring, and engaging students from past program years into the current cohort. Assessment results thus far indicate that program participants readily identify as scientists able to engage in research and that they perceive themselves as members of a scholarly community.