MURAP mentors future graduate students

The Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program began in 1989 with only three students. Since then, the program has grown from 72 to 661 fellows, with hundreds of Carolina faculty members serving as dedicated mentors.

MURAP is a cornerstone research program of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. The program provides fellows with interests in humanities, social sciences and fine arts a 10-week paid summer fellowship designed to help them gain admittance into graduate programs across the country and prepare them for life as a scholar.

The program is open to rising juniors and seniors who demonstrate a commitment to research and higher education.

About 16 to 20 students are selected each year to match with Carolina faculty mentors, whose research corresponds to the students’ interests, from economics to fine arts. Carolina students often participate in the program, along with students from schools like Harvard and Columbia universities.

“The idea is that they will make connections amongst each other and they will carry on long after graduate school into their professional lives, which has proven to be true so far,” said Kumi Silva, associate professor of communication, Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education and MURAP faculty director.

During the fellowship, students work with their mentors to produce an original research project. The research process is supported by a core set of classes about writing and research, communications and research presentation skills, professional development activities in partnership with the Graduate School and GRE classes through the Princeton Review.

Faculty mentors meet with students outside of the workshops to present their research findings and help students curate their projects.

“Programs like MURAP show them what they can achieve at a very manageable pace and enhances interactions with faculty across the University,” Silva said. “We’re building that infrastructure around them and their confidence to become great researchers.”

(Submitted photo)

This summer, students ended the program with a poster symposium, open to the public, where they shared their research findings. The symposium had a large turnout, providing networking opportunities for students. Research topics ranged from media representation to the economic benefits of parental leave.

More than 95% of MURAP fellows have enrolled in graduate or professional schools following their time in the program.

Lisa Calvente ’02 (MA) ’08 (PhD) was a MURAP fellow in 1998. She went on to earn a master’s and a doctorate at Carolina after being part of MURAP and is now an assistant professor in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ communication department and adjunct faculty in the African, African American and diaspora studies department.

“My MURAP cohort and I wanted to impress our faculty mentors and mirror them, so we never missed an opportunity to learn and perform what we learned in terms of our own scholarship and professional behavior,” said Calvente. “We trained to be researchers during the summer and also learned how to work and live together in community and solidarity even though we came from a variety of disciplines and from different universities across the nation.”