careers in intelligent transportation systems. Students have been part of a multi-disciplinary,eight-week summer research experience that integrated curricular and extracurricular activities. Verybriefly, workshops, trainings, site and lab visits, hands-on data collection and sensor involved research oncampus and on other university campuses targeted critical skills with a problem-based learning approach.The students also participated in a series of critical thinking sessions presented by the project team ondefining a research problem, literature search, and the research process (Pierce et al., 2019, Comert et al.,2020).The numbers of participants in past two summers were 8 and 7, respectively. The students were teamed inmultidisciplinary groups