  Several studies indicate that attracting students to research careers
requires to engage them from early undergraduate years. Following this
paradigm, our Engineering School has developed an undergraduate research
program that allows students to enroll in research in exchange for course
credits. Moreover, we developed a web portal to inform students about the
program and the opportunities, but participation remains lower than expected.
In order to promote student engagement, we attempt to build a personalized
recommender system of research opportunities to undergraduates. With this goal
in mind we investigate two tasks. First, one that identifies students that are
more willing to participate on this kind of program. A second task is
generating a personalized list of recommendations of research opportunities for
each student. To evaluate our approach, we perform a simulated prediction
experiment with data from our School, which has more than 4,000 active
undergraduate students nowadays. Our results indicate that there is a big
potential to create a personalized recommender system for this purpose. Our
results can be used as a baseline for colleges seeking strategies to encourage
research activities within undergraduate students.
