Spend one semester on a live community health study here in Fresno, on a small team, alongside university researchers. What your team produces becomes a real report, and that report goes into both a peer-reviewed publication and a grant application.
Undergraduates are usually handed data entry on somebody else's project, or nothing at all until graduate school. On a USEF project you are in the room from designing the measures to writing the thing up, in a single semester, on a study about your own community.
Every project produces a formal report. That report goes toward both a peer-reviewed publication and a grant application. It does not go in a drawer.
How a measure gets chosen, how a protocol survives contact with real people, how a finding is defended. Not how a textbook says it happens.
Research Assistant or Research Coordinator on a named community study, for your CV and your applications, plus an advisor who supervised you weekly and can write about your work in specifics.
Nutrition, air quality and health in the Central Valley. The people in the data are your neighbours, and the intervention runs whether or not the paper lands.
USEF builds its studies and its grant applications together with university researchers. You are not fetching coffee on somebody else's project. You are on the team, on the live work, and your name is on the team that did it.
Every project is a structured community-based research initiative: the team runs a real intervention, tracks what changes, and writes it up. You work in one of three areas. USEF places you where you fit and where the project needs you. You do not pick your own project, and we may move you if a project's needs change.
Tell us on the form which you are going for. If you are not sure, choose either and we will decide with you.
This is a real research team with real deadlines, and that is exactly why it counts for something afterwards. Two things are non-negotiable.
Applications are read in rounds, and applying early genuinely helps: the earlier rounds are reviewed first, and later applications are only read if places are still open.