Duke UniversityUndergraduate Research

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowships

The fundamental objectives of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are to reduce, over time, the serious underrepresentation on academic faculties of individuals from minority groups. as well as to address the consequences of these racial disparities for the educational system itself and for the larger society that it serves.These goals can be achieved both by increasing the number of students from underrepresented minority groups who pursue PhDs and by supporting the pursuit of PhDs by students who many not come from underrepresented minority groups but have demonstrated a commitment to the goals of MMUF.  

The Duke MMUF program supports a select group of students who demonstrate a strong commitment to entering PhD programs in specific areas of study.  Using  mentoring and funded research opportunities, the program provides this group of students with a greater awareness of the challenges and opportunities of academic life.

Each year, five sophomore students are selected as Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows; they receive stipends for the academic terms and summers for two years. During the summers, fellows, under the direction of a faculty mentor, pursue some form of directed study, intended to give them a sense of scholarly research activities. During the academic year, they may: (1) continue their independent research; or (2) work as a research assistant on a project which the faculty mentor is currently pursuing; or (3) work on curricular or teaching projects of interest to their faculty mentor.

In addition to the advantages of this close faculty interaction, fellows also have regular opportunities for social and intellectual discourse with students and faculty from the broad range of fields supported by the program. This program differs from many other undergraduate research opportunities in that the mechanisms for forming long-term relationships between students and faculty are incorporated at the Foundation level. The Program has four main components:

• Mentoring: Fellows receive personalized attention and advice from a faculty mentor and have regular interactions with the program coordinators. Faculty mentors receive an annual award of $800.

• Summer Research Support: Fellows receive support for eight-week research projects during the summers following their sophomore and junior years.  Rising junior fellows are required to complete a paper on their research by the end of the first eight-week project. Senior fellows are expected to complete a significant piece of written work related to their senior honors thesis.  Summer support includes a stipend of $3,900, a $750 housing allowance, and a travel budget of up to $600 for research-related expenses.  The summer projects are expected to be conducted on the Duke campus or, in some cases and with the approval of the Duke MMUF coordinators, off campus but under the regular and ongoing supervision of the Duke faculty mentor.  Occasionally, again with the approval of the MMUF coordinators, Junior fellows may participate in a summer research program at another MMUF institution.  Fellows are also strongly encouraged to apply in the spring of their junior year to the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers to help them prepare their graduate school applications. 

  Term-time Stipends: Fellows are awarded a $1,800 stipend each semester for their continuing work with their faculty mentor. The stipend is intended to supplant financial aid work study assignments. In addition, each senior fellow receives a $400 research budget  to cover project-related expenses and a $600 allocation for a GRE prep course.

• Loan Repayment: If a Mellon Undergraduate Fellow enrolls as a full-time student in a PhD program in a Mellon-identified discipline (see Eligibility) within two years of graduating from Duke, that fellow may have up to $10,000 of his or her undergraduate student loans repaid by the Mellon Foundation: one-eighth of the total indebtedness (up to a maximum of $1,250) in each of the first four years of study, and the remaining half of the total (up to a maximum of $5,000) if the PhD is earned within six years after enrollment. Mellon fellows who do not use this loan repayment allocation to repay undergraduate loans may use this benefit to repay designated educational loans for graduate study from recognized lenders.