Since 1998, IPR has offered a 12-week undergraduate summer training program to increase undergraduate involvement in research at IPR. The purpose is to give undergraduates a real experience in the conceptualization and conduct of policy-relevant social science research.

The program starts with a week-long course in statistical computing and students spend the rest of the time working as research assistants to IPR faculty. The program is designed so that some of the participants will continue to work for faculty during the following academic year and/or write honors theses on topics of interest to IPR. Students receive a stipend for their work.

Undergraduate research assistants are contributing to more than a dozen IPR faculty projects with assignments that range from coding census data on low-income families to primary, archival research on the history of sweatshops. Junior Ina Ganguli, for example, has worked on Social Security research with IPR director Fay Lomax Cook for nearly two years and participated in the training program last summer. She charted the movement of Social Security as it gained prominence on congressional and presidential agendas. Ganguli plans to use her research on Social Security in her thesis for the Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences program.