When summer stretches before many college undergraduates, they make plans: Spend time outdoors. Connect with friends. Catch up on screen time. For the 31 undergraduates participating in the 2023 Freshwater@UW Summer Research Scholars Program, those plans are the same, with slight alterations. The time outdoors is likely to be spent collecting field samples from a body of water. The friends are new ones—made from the pool of program participants who hail from California to Alabama from Virginia to Wisconsin, and points in between. The screen time isn’t about beating The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but instead entering findings into a larger dataset to further aquatic science projects. “I looked at many summer REU (research experiences for undergraduates) opportunities,” Sofia Mota Chichy, chemistry major from the University of…