Shepherded by Joel Oppenheim, senior associate dean for Biomedical Sciences, director of the Sackler Institute and an Alliance summer coordinator, the interns are fondly called SURPies by the Sackler staff. This summer there were 26 interns in the program including 11 underrepresented minorities designated as Leadership Alliance Summer Research Early Identification Program (SR-EIP) students.

"The Leadership Alliance started in 1992, and we were invited to apply for membership and accepted the following year," said Dr. Oppenheim. "One of the reasons we were brought into the Alliance was NYU's faculty development component. Many of the Alliance coordinators from minority serving institutions had participated in one of NYU's Faculty Resource Network (FRN) programs."

Directed by Debra Szybinski, NYU's institutional coordinator to the Alliance, the FRN has won the prestigious Hesburgh Award and the American Council on Education (ACE) Award for outstanding faculty development programs. FRN functions as the Leadership Alliance's faculty development component.

NYU joined the Alliance in 1993 with the Sackler Institute's research internship program and FRN. The NYU humanities/social sciences program, directed by David Slocum, associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and a summer coordinator to the Alliance, began in 1997.

"The Sackler Institute is the largest Ph.D. granting division of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences," said Dr. Oppenheim. "Our summer research program began in 1990 because of our faculty's concern that there were so few students of color in graduate school in the medical sciences. We put our heads together and that first year a couple of us chipped in money from our budgets to run the summer program."

The next year NYU School of Medicine (where Sackler Institute is located) offered to fund them if they switched their emphasis to minority students interested in medicine. Eventually, the medical school started a minority affairs office, which took over the medical internships. Dr. Oppenheim, who in 1994 was promoted to associate dean, inherited an existing summer program for potential Ph.D.s and M.D./Ph.D.s, that was aided by both internal funding and external funding-first from the American Association for Microbiology and later from the Leadership Alliance.

"SURP started out as a minority program, but now it has become a truly open program for both minority and majority students," said Dr. Oppenheim. "We are looking for a diversity of students, but we are also looking for bright students who have strong academic backgrounds and are interested in pursuing either Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. programs."

With this in mind, the main criterion for admission to SURP is "would the student potentially be competitive for admission to one of our graduate programs." At NYU the average student accepted into the Ph.D. program has a 3.5 GPA for the Ph.D. and a 3.7 for the M.D./Ph.D. However, Dr. Oppenheim and his staff will review the application of any SURP student who has a 3.0 or above GPA for a Ph.D. or a 3.4 or above for the M.D./Ph.D. program.

"The program has been in existence for so long now and is so well known that we get between 600 and 700 applications a year. It is actually, on a numbers basis, the most difficult program at NYU medical school to get into."

It is difficult to win a place in SURP, but not impossible. It helps to be from a school with which NYU has cultivated a relationship, like one of the other Alliance member institutions. "If I get a personal letter from a student's advisor or a faculty member for whom that student has done research saying that this student is really a lot better than his or her grade point average would indicate then I'm going to consider that student," said Dr. Oppenheim.

Students usually must have completed at least two years of college to be considered for SURP "but occasionally-last year in fact-we will take a student who has just completed their freshman year. However, that student had already completed two years of research, including one in high school, and she was brought to our attention by her advisor who said she was excellent in the lab and would be a really spectacular student-and she did extremely well. She's at Harvard this summer," he added.

"As most administrators are aware, African American males are a dwindling population, and we go out of our way to try to recruit them into the program. We also look for students on a geographic basis, and we have cultivated relationships with schools that have supplied us with graduate students over the years," he continued. "We are willing to take students from very small schools, and over half of our students are from state schools. SURP is a recruitment program, and we want to expose these students to all that we have to offer so that they will think about coming to NYU. We try to make their summer experience as positive as we can so that they will see that this is a viable place to come to do their dissertation work for their Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D.

"We spend a lot of time with our summer students, especially in the first two or three weeks, so that they begin functioning as a group. I try to be with the students as much as possible during this period and get to know them all by name. I'm the one who places them in the labs, and, if there are any problems, I'm the one they come to. We go out of our way to establish relationships with the students, both as individuals and as a group."

The "we" Dr. Oppenheim refers to is his office staff: Debra Stalk, Lisabeth Green, Laurie Bartell and Joanne McGrath. "They are an incredible support for the students and very culturally attuned," he added. SURP's resident assistants, the graduate students that help with the interns, are usually former SURPies themselves. Marcus Jones, Joe Merola and Alex Zouzias, this summer's assistants, have gone through the program and presented at the Leadership Alliance Summer Symposium (LASS).

"Don't get discouraged if you apply to summer programs and are not accepted by them," Dr. Oppenheim advises. "Students tend to apply to programs on their campus or another campus near them. This is your time to see what life is like on another campus-a graduate school that you would be interested in attending.

Certainly apply to programs that will expose you to something new. You should take the time to meet and network with other students who will be your colleagues and peers for the rest of your career. So, when you are in a summer program get actively involved, get out and get to know people. Not just students, get to know the faculty. If you do a good job in their labs, they are going to be your strongest supporters when you want to attend that graduate school. It's always good to have someone who knows you shepherding your application along in the process."