It is tempting to leave recruiting to instructors, but this limits your potential pool of students. Recruiting at the Georgia Tech site relies on three elements: online team listings, information sessions, and email campaigns.

Online Team Listings

The VIP Program is designed to serve all students, and online listings are a key component in student accessibility. At most institutions, students usually get involved in undergraduate research by approaching faculty or by being approached by faculty, which substantially limits access and further marginalizes some students (students are intimidated or don't think the programs are meant for them). By listing all VIP projects online, proactively recruiting students, and having a low-stress application, the Georgia Tech Program greatly increases student access to the program.

The Georgia Tech program has a Drupal webpage, and they are happy to share the site (free of charge) with interested programs. They host their site on a GT-provided server and pay an external designer/vendor to manage security patches. (Patches sometimes affect the site, so the vendor fixes these problems as they arise.)

The Stony Brook University program also developed a system they are willing to share with other sites. In their system, prospective faculty fill out the team information sheet online. Once the VIP Director approves the sheet, the system generates a webpage for the team. (At Georgia Tech, the program uses a Word file for the team information sheet and then manually set up the webpage.)

Information Sessions

Information sessions can take a variety of shapes – pizza lunch, poster session, booth in the student center, etc. Formats vary by site and program size. Small programs often hold pizza information sessions. The small size allows each team to give a short presentation. As your program grows, these sessions will get too long! At this stage you can transition to poster information sessions. This allows students to talk to the teams in which they are interested and to come and go as they please. We suggest providing teams with a poster template, which is essentially the team information sheet in poster format. In their early days, the Georgia Tech program had student employees create these team-info-sheet-posters. Now that they're larger, it is harder to handle, so they just provide new instructors and existing teams with the template.

Information sessions should coincide with student registration periods. The Georgia Tech program tries to hold their session the week before registration begins, when students are thinking about what classes they want to take next semester. Additionally, they found their minority student enrollment increased when they started timing their information sessions in this way.

Email Campaign

Information sessions give you a focal point for your email campaign. Even if the session isn't well attended, the email campaign will bring students to your webpage. The Georgia Tech program found that while departments had email lists, the keepers of these lists were often unwilling to send emails on their behalf (at least semester after semester). In other cases, they would include their announcement in an email newsletter that students didn't actually read. To work around this, the Georgia Tech program builds their own email lists every semester.

Send Emails by Major: The Georgia Tech program found that a generic email, "Dear [Institution] Students," yielded lower attendance and fewer applications than emails to specific majors, e.g. "Dear Computer Science Students." While it takes a bit of time, they always do their email campaigns in this way. If you want sophomores and up, remember to filter out 1st semester freshmen.

Explain what VIP is: Even if you've operated for multiple semesters, do not assume that students know what VIP is or that they read your email last semester. When the Georgia Tech program did not explain what the program was, they saw their minority student enrollment drop.

Include a Call to Action: Be clear in what you're asking students to do (attend the information session, visit the webpage, etc.).

Below is an email template that has worked well for the Georgia Tech site. The blue text is modified for each email blast by major. The red text is updated with dates and times. The hanging indents and bold text make the calls to action stand out.