Shifting Undergraduate Research into High Gear

The Energy Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at the MIT Energy Initiative—one of many such immersive programs at MIT—has supported more than 200 undergraduates with diverse majors in spending a summer doing full-time research. For her UROP, mechanical engineering student Elizabeth Mittmann ′18 helped to create brake, suspension, and steering subsystems for MIT’s Solar Vehicle Team. “I enjoyed getting a hands-on feel for the engineering, design, build, and test process,” she says. “The project led me to think more about the efficiency of objects around me.”