Senior History major Megan Stanton has made a new friend this summer — an intriguing and complicated woman with an almost saintly personality.

Stanton is researching the life and written works of Mary Rich, a 17th century noblewoman whose manuscripts record her experience as an aristocratic woman and capture both her semi-independent attitudes about marriage and her conventional Puritan lifestyle. Stanton is spending her summer days in Doe Library reading Rich’s journals, deciphering her 17th century handwriting and getting a leg up on her own senior thesis.

“I’ve become very friendly with the various student assistants [in the library],” Stanton says. “In fact, on my first day, when one of the assistants set me up on a microfilm reader, she took one look at Mary Rich’s handwriting and said, ‘Oh man, I bet you’re going to be here for a while!’”

Stanton is one of 49 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF), participating in the program in its seventh year. SURF provides seniors with living expenses so they can dig into a research project of their very own. For seniors contemplating further academic study, the SURF program is a way to taste academic life and the kind of intensive research that forms the foundation for graduate work.

“During the academic year, undergraduates load up with coursework and many pile a job on top of that,” says Terry Strathman, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research. “The SURF funding allows them to buy the time for research. Summer is their opportunity to have a sustained encounter with research and enjoy the satisfactions of real engagement on a project of their own design.”

Student research projects span the sciences, humanities and social sciences and often take students overseas. Cristina Lau, an Asian Studies major, is using her SURF funds to look into the experience of Chinese restaurant workers in Mexico. A third-generation Chinese-Mexican, Lau has spent a month in Mexico interviewing restaurant workers and has found written histories that are unavailable here in the U.S.

“I feel fortunate to get a hold of such rare resources,” says Lau. “There are currently over 50,000 Chinese in [Mexico], and yet we are an obscure social group to academia and the world. I feel the responsibility and need to give us a voice.”

Lau has extended her work for the SURF program by making a documentary from footage she shot during her fieldwork, building a website, writing her senior thesis and producing an article that will be published next year in the McNair research journal.

“I try to make time to relax,” Lau says, “but then I’d find myself falling behind. I only take a break when I really feel overworked.”

SURF fellows encounter the challenges of time management while working on a long-term project. Amanda Cook, a senior in sociology, is studying the ways decisions are made in worker cooperatives.

“Being able to devote an entire summer to a project I’m passionate about is fantastic,” Cook says. “Part of managing my time is limiting myself to a standard 35-40 hour work week. I’m going to be working on this project throughout the next school year as well, so there’s no reason to rush it and get burned out early on.”

Initiative and industry are traits shared by the varied projects proposals that receive SURF support. Other research subjects this summer include labor market deregulation in Costa Rica, the cinematic characteristics of Marcel Proust’s prose and American competitive eating contests.

  These enterprising seniors are well supported in their work. Through in-person meetings and emails — often across continents — students are in touch with their faculty mentors, who sign on to be available through the summer to monitor student progress.

Cristina Lau’s mentor, political science lecturer Darren Zook, is currently in South Korea. Yet he and Cristina exchange frequent emails.

“Her reports show that her research skills are growing by the day,” Zook says. “She has received an education that being only in a classroom cannot provide.”

Associate professor of British History Ethan Shagan has just finished is first year teaching at Berkeley. This summer he is mentoring Megan Stanton. Shagan understands the value of undergraduate research opportunities first-hand, having participated himself in a similar program while in college at another university.

“There are lots of programs through which undergraduates in the sciences can intern in laboratories, but it is extremely hard in the humanities and social sciences for undergraduates to get any real sense of what their professors do when they’re not teaching and what research in those fields is all about,” Shagan says. “SURF is a perfect opportunity for Megan to do real research — that is, research that may or may not work out, and where there are no crib notes available because no one has ever done it before.”