SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It's prominently featured in Carl Sagan's book Contact, as well as the movie based on the book starring Jodie Foster. In real life, Jill Tarter is one of the heroes of the SETI research effort.
In 7th grade, I analyzed optical SETI data that I requested and gratefully received from Prof. Paul Horowitz at Harvard. It was a project done for fun, and also for purposely avoiding the Arachnid (spider) unit in science class. My dad was also really into SETI, and once we went together to see Jill Tarter give a public lecture at a local university.
I am inspired by UC Berkeley's Breakthrough Listen github README file, which expressed a desire to "train the next generation of scientists who will participate in the search." There are so many technical challenges posed by SETI projects that are deep, interesting and generally applicable, e.g., signal processing, statistics, and programming. I'm creating notes on what could be part of a great curriculum for undergraduate researchers.