"I had an amazing time at SURF-IT. I met so many wonderful people who are still close friends today. SURF-IT also helped me realize that I did want to continue on to graduate school and helped give me the extra motivation I needed. Having this research on my resume has really increased my internship offers for the summer and also gave me more to write about in my personal statement. It's a great thing to talk about during interviews and employers are always very impressed to hear about my research. I couldn't be happier that I chose to do SURF-IT with my summer."
"SURF-IT was an awesome experience - I actually chose my graduate focus based on what I did at SURF-IT."
"The experience I gained from SURF-IT (especially getting published) greatly enhanced my resume and helped it stand out among a sea of applicants. I'm very excited to be working for a great company like GE."
"I learned how to quickly pick up new computer languages. I learned that you have to be willing to tackle problems that you don't know how to solve. Research takes time and isn't a simple process."
"The SURF-IT has led me to strongly consider applying to graduate school and also to consider doing research with a professor during the school year."
"SURF-IT was a great experience. All of the people in the program were great and we became good friends. I still talk to a few and even visited one of my roommates from the summer last fall at her school. We went out to dinner together every weekend and went to the beach any time we weren't working.
The apartments we stayed in are pretty nice. There is a full kitchen, and a powder room with two sinks in addition to the bathroom. We each had a single room.
I can't complain about the money either--travel was covered, plus the stipend was really nice. … The meal plan provided was great as well--they offered halfway through to refill our cards for us, even though most of us didn't need to. I didn't get mine refilled and still had money left over at the end.
Santa Cruz is really nice. I'm from upstate New York, and the summers are cold and rainy. It didn't rain once while I was in Santa Cruz and its always around 70-80 degrees during the day.
About the lab: [My mentor] and her grad student are the sweetest people I've ever met. [Another student] and I were invited to lunch at [my mentor’s] house twice. At first I was worried about how many hours I 'should' be spending in the lab, since I like to stay up late and sleep in, but [my grad student mentor] said it didn't matter to her what hours we were in the lab as long as deadlines were met.
I really enjoyed the research project as well -- I had never done iPhone programming, had never worked with Macs before actually, but they provided me with a MacBook and iPod touch to use for the summer, and after a couple of weeks I got used to Objective-C. I actually made a game for my senior research project this year to go with the iPhone app we made, and I will be sending the code to [my grad student mentor] in a few weeks."
"I find that at the end of the program we have all grown to be very close. Not only to the members of the SURF-IT program, but to students in other summer programs and those are on campus to work. Many times the UCSC students would invite their local friends to hang out with the group. This was a great opportunity for us to meet other people in the area who are no directly involved with CS and CE."