2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) program was conducted over four years, including a NCE (No Cost Extension) fourth year. The program trained a total of 30 Community College (CC) students, 10 per year in the field of Smart Engineering with four strands: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Smart Health, Smart Materials, and Smart Infrastructure. The program ran for 10 weeks during summer terms as non-residential program for local CC students recruited from CCs in the greater Boston area. The program activities included high-quality research at Northeastern University, a major R1 institution, participating in research of their choice by working in a research faculty member in the College of Engineering. In addition to academic research, students were mentored by research graduate students, received instructions on the transfer process from CCs to 4-year academic institutions.

This extended abstract presents a summative evaluation of the grant activities over its four years of running Northeastern University Pathways REU site. The abstract reflects on may aspects of the program including: (1) comparisons of the four cohorts demographics; (2) synopsis of the research projects conducted; (3) comparing the project formative evaluations of the four years; (4) students reflections on their experiences; (5) impact metric of how many students published professional papers and how many applied for higher education; (6) using Generative AI in the fourth and last year and how we created Chatbots to help students learn SparkFun Arduino programming of the grant activities; and (7) reflection on the overall experience for the research community to learn from if they submit REU proposals to NSF.

The four-year summative evaluation research questions include:
• What are the similarities between the four cohorts of students, including demographics, research interests, and the most popular summer activities in addition to research?
• How many students got motivated to publish and apply to transfer to 4-year education? What are the obstacles?
• What we could have better, if any, to increase the impact of the REU experience on students?
• What do participating students say about using Generative AI chatbots in their learning in the last year where Generative AI has become a mainstream in our lives?