Establishing a Team
New teams are generally recommended for projects that will last three or more years and will involve three to six students at the time the team is established. Teams may plan to grow to eight to 30+ students over time, depending upon the research project scope and structure.
Prospective VIP Team Leaders (UA faculty or staff) who are interested in forming a team can email VIP Program Coordinator Dr. Kay Orzech at vipprogram@arizona.edu to request an informational meeting. Some topics of discussion may include: your ideas for your VIP team topic or structure, the benefits of VIP participation for team leaders, and/or information on when new teams can join the VIP program. The VIP Program Coordinator can also facilitate connection with the VIP Faculty Director or an experienced team leader to answer further questions.
To see how other Team Leaders have described their teams, please visit our Explore Teams page and click on any of the brief team descriptions to see full team pages.
If you are already familiar with (or teaching) a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), see this one-page document that compares VIPs and CUREs to understand the similarities and differences.
To ensure you are ready to launch a VIP Team, consider the questions below:
- Is your project goal or driving question one that’s large/complex enough to lead to three (+) years of research?
- Will the project benefit both you and the undergraduate students, even if students are not yet highly trained in discipline-specific data collection or analysis skills?
- Will you involve at least 3 students in the project during the VIP Team’s first semester?
- When structuring your team-based research or design project, will you (initially, or eventually) use multiple levels of mentorship such as team leader(s), postdoc(s) or grad student(s), and/or upper-level undergraduate student(s)?
VIP welcomes faculty and staff who are interested in the VIP model (or may already be using a similar multi-level mentoring model) to join us, given program capacity to add new teams.