Summer Research &
Innovation Program

Mentorship Program (Timelines vary)

The Mentorship program shares an application with SRIP. The Mentorship 1: Summer timeline is available to Morganton residential and Online students. Students that participate in timelines that include a summer component (Mentorship 1: Summer, Mentorship 3: Extended) will participate in SRIP. 

NCSSM Durham-hosted student experiences are primarily within academic research with partners at Duke University, NC Central University, NC State University, and UNC-Chapel Hill and the Mentorship course curriculum is extensively research-focused.  The range of topics and fields of interest widely vary within research (STEM, social sciences and humanities).  Each year a limited number of mentors outside of academia are available such as with RTI International, a local architecture firm, or a local start-up company.

• NCSSM Students Gain Full-Time, Professional Research Experience During Summer Mentorship (2022)

• Durham SRIP Showcase - Summer Mentorship (2024)

Summer Research in the Humanities (3 weeks)

The goal of Summer Research is to introduce students to work inside and outside of archives and other sites of historical knowledge, allowing them to acquire a stronger and more sophisticated sense not only of textual but of material and cultural objects and artifacts.  This course is inseparably critical and creative: critical, for it teaches students to interrogate the very notion of an archive, and creative, for the interrogation will lead to their own production of knowledge in the form of a research proposal.  In the last ten years or so, the institutional limitations of archives have been valuably identified; however, the recognition that sites of knowledge are constructed does not imply the determination of what can be known.  For if it is the work of archivists to identify, catalog and systematize, and protect the objects in their collection, it is not their job to study exhaustively all the contents of their collection.  They might emphasize some objects at the expense of others, but they do not prevent the discovery of new meanings in the available items.  There is always the possibility for surprise, even delight (or horror) within the site in which documents and other objects are stored.  The great opportunity, at once theoretical and practical, of the active investigation of the collections at UNC and Duke is to work with documents whose significance is not altogether clear as well as those whose significance seems peculiarly determined—so clear, in other words, that other meanings are obscured or occluded.  Our focus upon archival is, however, necessarily grounded in the historical worlds of the local.  In other words, the ground underneath the student’s feet, its deep histories and disruptions, will become the object of our study.  What is the relation between local knowledge and global experience?  How do economic and social transformations shape the more intimate, everyday forms of cultural practice and political desire in places seemingly far removed from such forces? 

Trips to diverse museums as well as more informal excursions to historical sites and to renovated and ruined places in and around Durham will offer further practice in the difficult pleasures of reading diverse objects (including architecture) in their relation to built space.  Evenings will be spent in reading and in conversation, preparing for the next day’s adventures.  What will advene, however, cannot be foretold. 

• Critical independence and the art of questioning in NCSSM’s Summer Research in Humanities (2020)

• Inspiring a Love of Learning and Concept of Self: NCSSM’s Summer Research in Humanities (2022)

• Durham SRIP Showcase - Research in the Humanities (2024)

Summer Research in Mathematics (3 weeks)

This summer program is a three-week on-campus research program in mathematics. Students will form small groups to investigate a mathematical problem and communicate their findings to others. Daily activities will include whole group meetings, small group meetings, and individual work time. Students will also communicate their findings with the whole group on the last day of the program.

• Summer Research in Mathematics Enables Students to See a New Side of Math (2022)

• Durham SRIP Showcase - Summer Research in Mathematics (2024)