DREU Student Participants

As part of your Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates experience, you are required to create a website that provides information about your participation in the DREU. This page gives requirements for, and suggests contents of, the page. The DREU participants' pages will be publically accessable to anyone interested in learning about the DREU, or about your participation in it. For example, when a student is considering applying for the DREU, they may be interested in the experiences of previous participants.

During your mentorship, you will maintain your website at a URL of your selection. About two weeks into the mentorship, you should submit the URL of your website to the DREU participant's website. This is one of the requirements for the second DREU stipend payment. Please note that your final web site (for your fourth stipend) can not contain any ads and must be installed on the CRA-W web site. If you choose to use a free site to create/host your temporary web site, be sure that you will be able to easily move your web site to the CRA-W web server (without ads) to create your final web site. The CRA-W server supports PHP and JavaScript.

At the end of your mentorship, you will submit the files for the final version of your website, which will be permanently installed on the CRA-W DREU website. These files can be submitted to the DREU participant's website. Approval and installation of your website on the CRA-W DREU website is one of the requirements for your final stipend payment. Detailed instructions for submitting your final website can be found here .

At a minimum, your website should contain the following information, which should be linked from the first page of your website so that the information is easy to locate:

• Information about you:
  • Your name
  • The school you attend
  • Your department
  • Your grade level and when you plan to graduate
  • Your major
  • Your e-mail address
  • A link to your website, if you have one
  • Etc.

• Information about your mentor:
  • Their name
  • Their school
  • Their department
  • Their area of research
  • A link to their website(s)
  • Etc.

• A description of your research project and goals (as outlined by you and your mentor at the beginning of your project).

• A journal of your project work with weekly entries in which you describe your results, your findings, your algorithms, your frustrations, etc.

• A final report of your research project.

Suggested Extra Website Content

Prospective applicants who want more information about the project will be interested in many aspects of your experience.

• So be creative in your website design. For example, Beth Tsai created an interesting web site that detailed her summer at Texas A&M University during Summer 2002.

• Include information about other activities and aspects of the program in which you participated during the summer such as sports or research group outings, roadtrips you took, conferences you attended, your experiences finding lodging, etc.

1. Tar file all of your website's files and directories.
2. Submit the resultant file to the DREU participant's website.
3. You will be informed by email if your site is approved, or if it needs some modifications or additions.

Tips for successful website installation

• Be careful with personal information such as phone numbers. Check your resume and pages for information that shouldn't be distributed freely.
• Include a default homepage called index.html or index.php.
• Save reports and presentations in platform independent types such as pdf or postscript. You can do this easily by using a postscript printer and printing to a file or by using a freely available program such as pdf995 to "print" documents to a pdf file.
• Make sure that your file names are used in a case-sensitive context. This means that the EXACT file name matches the calls in your links and image sources. Some web servers are case-insensitive, so they don't care if you name an image 'image.JPG' and reference it as 'image.jpg'. Our server does care, and your images will not show up.
• If your webpage was hosted on a windows server, try moving it temporarily to a unix web server in the department and unpack it. Just make sure you pages and links work.
• If you created your tar on a windows machine, try creating the tar file from a unix machine. This is the version of tar I will be unpacking it from.
• If you ftped your tar from a unix machine to a windows machine and are now trying to upload it to the web, just upload it from a unix machine so the file type won't be changed automatically by the windows machine.