A very happy Friday to you all. It’s been a pretty eventful week for quite a few of us as we prepare for the opening of abstract submissions this Monday and, thanks in large part to the PR and Workshops subcommittee, I think it’s safe to say we’re ready to launch! Come Monday, the abstract submission form will be live on our website, and a wave of publicity should start going out announcing the opening of abstract submissions, including emails to faculty and students, text messages, social media posts, messages on the digital monitors and in Canvas, and good old fashioned paper fliers posted on classroom doors (which I stubbornly believe are still pretty effective). Maybe we’ll get a trickle of submissions in the coming weeks, maybe a deluge, or maybe none. But no one on our campuses will be able to credibly say they haven’t heard about the Undergraduate Research Symposium, which was always the idea behind opening submissions in the fall. We’ll see what happens, but I remain hopeful that it’ll increase our submission numbers.
Separate from the opening of abstract submissions, it's well worth mentioning that many of our subcommittees are continuing to advance some very important work toward building a comprehensive UR program at the TSC. I’ll leave it for the chairs to discuss their subcommittees’ work at our next UR Council meeting, but I’d just like to acknowledge here that the Research Mentoring subcommittee is working on a professional development program for faculty research mentors, something we’ll be hearing a lot more about in coming weeks. In addition to managing publicity for the opening of abstract submissions, the PR and Workshops subcommittee is planning our increasingly popular workshop series for this academic year (They are a hard-working group!). And we’re well on our way to launching the inaugural issue of our student journal of undergraduate research, also something we’ll be hearing more and more about.
There’s plenty more I could probably mention, but those are just a few things to celebrate as we close out this week in UR at TSC. As I’ve said before, next week will mark a milestone for us as we open abstract submissions, for the first time, during the fall semester, and I’m sure you all share my excitement about turning this corner. By this time next week, I think we’ll all feel an even greater sense of momentum, with publicity going out for the first time this academic year, thanks to the hard work of so many Council members. But for now, I wish you all a pleasant, restful weekend. And I wish Clemson’s bus would break down on the way to Tallahassee, because I don’t think this is going to go well. But I digress.
Dan
No comments:
Post a Comment