SURF L&S Faculty Mentor Eligibility:
To be eligible to serve as a mentor for a SURF fellow, a prospective mentor must have one of the following affiliations::
- Tenure-track faculty at UC Berkeley
- Lecturers with appointments through at least the 2026/2027 Academic Year
- Emeritus/Emerita faculty
- Faculty PIs and research scientists with permanent positions at CHORI, SSL, LBL and UCSF
SURF Faculty Mentor Guidelines:
Undergraduate applicants to the SURF program are required to list a faculty mentor who has agreed to support their research over the summer months. The main expectation for faculty mentors is to serve as the subject-area specialist with the expertise to advise the undergraduate about the state of the field as well as the intellectual substance of the project as it evolves from conceptualization through realization. Faculty mentors are not compensated by the SURF program; their mentorship is an extension of their departmental undergraduate advising and teaching.
It should be noted that while some students will condense their projects within seven weeks of full-time research, others may counterbalance their research project with summer classes or internships, pursuing their SURF research on a part-time basis over the course of the entire summer. The SURF program aspires not only to meet the needs of students in a variety of situations but also to make the administrative burden on faculty extremely minimal. Faculty are, for instance, not required to perform any service for SURF or be involved in its summer programming; we also have reduced the expectation for faculty to write letters of recommendation for the students they agree to mentor. More details about the program and the expectations of faculty mentors are described below.
During the Application Period:
SURF applicants should ask prospective faculty mentors to read and comment on their research proposals before submitting their application. If the student does not first request this, the faculty mentor should ask to read the proposal before agreeing to supervise the project.
After students submit their applications, prospective mentors will be contacted to verify that 1) they have agreed to mentor the student in question and 2) that they have reviewed the student’s research proposal and can attest that the proposal represents the student’s own work.
Faculty are not required to write a letter of recommendation for applicants to SURF; instead SURF is intended to serve as an opportunity for both students and faculty to develop a mentoring relationship.
During the Summer:
During the course of the summer, faculty mentors should anticipate having regular check-ins with the SURF Fellow to review their progress and provide intellectual support and discussion. We believe it is the responsibility of the SURF fellow to schedule these meetings, and seek guidance when they need it, but we also hope that faculty will keep their students accountable to a regular cadence of check-ins and let us know if a SURF fellow does not honor their commitments or has fallen out of regular communication. The frequency of these meetings is at the discretion of the faculty mentor and student, though we suggest adopting either a biweekly or monthly schedule of meetings. We expect that students will interface directly with their faculty mentors during these check-ins. While graduate students or post-docs can handle day-to-day supervision of SURF fellows (particularly in lab-based research), the faculty mentor should be familiar with the undergraduate’s research proposal and bear responsibility for supervising the fellow’s research.
Faculty mentors should be aware that the SURF program requires fellows to attend both research cluster meetings and workshops. These are organized by the SURF program to both support the fellows’ scholarly evolution and foster a collegiate community with other undergraduate researchers in L&S. All SURF Fellows are required to attend meetings and workshops between June 1 and August 14. As such, faculty mentors (particularly in labs where regular attendance is required) should give their students leave to attend these required events. Faculty are not required to participate in any of the SURF program’s workshops or meetings, though attendance at their mentee’s end-of-summer research presentation, generally scheduled during the second week of August, is welcomed and encouraged.
Faculty mentors should look out for an invitation to the OURS Summer Social, an event gathering SURF fellows and other participants in OURS programs with lunch provided. There may be similar events in the following Fall as well. Attendance at these events is optional.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach us at surf@berkeley.edu