The Week in UR – February 21, 2025

Happy Friday! If Spring is the most wonderful time of year for UR, we’re now entering that season of great celebration and good cheer, when visions of bright colorful posters, gesticulating student presenters, and smart-looking publication credits dance before our eyes in great good anticipation of what, in my opinion, should be a bank holiday, if all were right and well with the world. “Symposium Day” does have quite the ring to it, no?

Indeed, plans are proceeding apace for our Big Day. The current abstract tally stands at 144. I’ve received an unusually high number of last-minute entreaties this year from students pleading to have their abstracts considered late. And because I’m a big, old pushover, I’ve been letting them all through. So the number has crept up just slightly, though only just. But after today, that’s really, really it. That spigot is getting shut off for good because, frankly, we’re bursting at the seams this year, and I don’t think we can handle any more, at least not with the little time that remains until our Big Day. But might it hit 150? That figure does sound grand, and something to talk up when we’re supplicating ourselves before the powers that be and asking for more, always, and ever, more, money to keep on growing this thing bigger and better than anyone ever thought possible at a mid-sized community college. Expressions of student interest sure do help on that front.

Let me not neglect to say an enormous THANK YOU to all of you who agreed to review abstracts this year. The process went along much more smoothly than I’d ever anticipated. Once they were all parceled out 10 apiece, there really wasn’t need to call upon every member of the UR Council to review them. I want to say a special thanks to those who reached out saying they were happy to help even if they weren’t sent abstracts in the first round. It’s been a lot of work this week, but with so many people sharing the burden, I’m happy to report that every abstract has been reviewed, and every student who submitted an abstract has either been notified of their acceptance or sent instructions for revision. By Wednesday morning next, we’ll have our final list of presenters. And then we’ll really be off to the races.

More exciting news this week, as I’m sure you’ve all seen by now (And how on earth have I gotten all the way to the fourth paragraph without mentioning it?), is that the Tallahassee State College Undergraduate Research Journal officially launched on Wednesday! As you’ve no doubt already seen, it can be colloquially known, with the approval of the Niki, of course, as TSC URJ, which does have a right fine ring to it. And my does it look smart. I keep revisiting the site just to sit and look at it (Really not joking, though I kind of wish I were, because there’s a lot to do!). But every time I revisit it, it puts me in an even better mood than I was before. And I’m usually in a pretty good mood. Why not give it a try yourself?

https://journals.flvc.org/TSCURJ/index

In all seriousness, this is a huge accomplishment. There aren’t many universities that have such a well-designed and executed UR journal, and no community college that I’m aware of. This is huge, folks. To Niki and the UR journal committee (or perhaps the TSC URJ Editorial Board? Think about it.), I stand in awe, and I know I’m not the only one.

Returning briefly to the symposium, by way of the workshop series, please everyone spread the word that the Public Relations and Workshops Committee will host their popular Creating a Research Poster Workshop this coming Tuesday at 2:00. Complete details are on the UR homepage as always, and all accepted poster presenters have received details about the workshop, as they will once again on Monday. (It is also the season of UR Spam, don’t you know.) Please encourage any poster presenters you’re mentoring to attend; it’s a really helpful workshop. And note, too, that there will be a repeat of it next Tuesday, which is good, because we’ve got right around 70 (count them 70) posters in the symposium this year. Also, lest we forget, there’ll be a 3MT workshop on Thursday, as well, same bat time, same bat station. Same way to tune in: By going to our homepage.

I think that’s enough for this week, everybody. Time to give some TLC to those essays I should’ve already graded, whilst I was coordinating abstract reviews. Please everybody remember that we’ve got a meeting scheduled for this coming Tuesday. My goal is to have a draft of the schedule done by then, and I really want to get everyone’s input on the schedule. With the symposium having grown as it has, it’s going to have to look different this year, so let’s have a chat about what it ought to look like, given what we’ve got to work with. Until then, I hope you all can get out and enjoy this cool and clear weekend we’ve got ahead of us. This time of year, we can sure use a little pleasant outdoor time, and we don’t get enough of that around these parts.

Dan

The Week in UR - February 16, 2025 (Belated, but for Good Reason)

Happy….Weekend? The Week in UR got away from me this week, but I had the best possible excuse. J.T. and I have been just a little busy since Friday morning, accompanying seven of the brightest young minds I’ve yet to encounter in my 20-odd year career in higher education, traveling to the Florida Undergraduate Research Conference (FURC) in Tampa. And that, my friends, is no exaggeration. Honestly, I don’t know where we found these students. When they weren’t animatedly presenting, they were off studying and fretting about their upcoming exams. But there were moments of levity, too, and I really think the students enjoyed the experience a great deal. A world of thanks is due to their faculty mentors, J.T., Gina, and moi, all of whom have spent untold amounts of time getting them ready to present. And thanks again to J.T. for doing much of the planning, and the driving! (I'm utterly incompetent as a driver.) Below, for your viewing pleasure, you’ll find just a few of the many snapshots we took during our whirlwind weekend at FURC 2025.

More good news comes to us from the Symposium front: Our final count of abstracts is 142, a 45% increase over last year, and certainly a record number of submissions in the history of the College’s UR Symposium! Now our immediate task is to get these abstracts reviewed. I parceled them all out on Thursday, assigning them first to those able to attend our January 14 UR Council meeting, where we discussed procedures for reviewing abstracts. With each of us reviewing approximately 10 of them, we didn’t need a particularly large cohort of reviewers. For those serving as abstract reviewers, I know I speak for everyone in extending a huge word of thanks. That said, please make sure to get your abstracts reviewed just as soon as possible, if you haven’t done so already. I’ll send out that an initial round of acceptances and instructions for revision to students tomorrow morning. If at all possible, I’d like to let students know early this week whether or not they’ve been accepted so they can begin completing their artifacts, which are due March 5, just a little over two weeks away! The deadline for all reviews will be this coming Friday, February 21, at noon. After that, I’ll need to reassign any unread abstracts, and I might be soliciting some help with those, as well. And having said that, now no one will be checking email Friday afternoon, I suppose…

One final bit of exciting news: The TSC UR Journal (TSC URJ?) officially launches tomorrow! (Niki, I hope that’s what you told me; it’s becoming quite the challenge to keep track of everything.) Sometime tomorrow, the journal will be live on the UR Program’s website, and then we can start getting the word out about yet another fantastic opportunity for our students to share their research. This will be quite a milestone, and a significant achievement for the journal committee, who worked so tirelessly to pull this together so quickly. Surely, no peer-reviewed journal has ever been launched in such a short period of time. Well-done, Niki and all committee members.

I’m going to leave it at that for today. It is well past time for me to take a long afternoon nap. It was a quick trip and an exhausting weekend, but well worth it. If you’re reading this over the weekend (And if you are, shame on you.), I hope you enjoy what remains of it. And I wish everyone a pleasant week ahead.

Dan

The Week in UR – February 7, 2025

Happy Friday! It has been a truly unbelievable week in UR. And I do mean that, like, literally. Indeed, I’m half convinced that it might all just be one extended false memory. Because the fact is, it’s been a very, very good week in UR, and I can’t quite believe that it really happened. So allow me to recap, and then let me know what you think.

It all started out unassumingly enough. On Monday, I met with our seven FURC presenters. J.T. got called away, so I was the one who spent an otherwise fine hour of my afternoon getting peppered with questions that I couldn’t begin to imagine the answers to: Where do we leave our cars overnight? What time are our presentations? What does the venue look like? Who attends this thing, anyway? And what do I even we wear? I hadn’t the foggiest. It didn’t help that these are probably some of the smartest folks on campus. No kidding around. They’re the ones with the sense to eschew the usurious tuitions charged by the R1s for a community college, and then take advantage of every single blasted opportunity on offer, all while taking on not a penny of student loan debt. If only I could go back 25 years… But I suppose we muddled through alright, and they’re a lovely group of young people. As long as I told them the right place to meet next Friday (I do have my doubts), we’ll have ourselves a fine time. As important, they’ll show the entire FL UR community what community college undergraduate researchers are capable of, and learn a lot whilst doing it.

When I returned to my office, sweaty and cold, and feeling much as though I’d just been on trial for my own life, why what did greet me but an email from J.T. containing three of the finest UR Fellowship applications one could ever expect to see. And just like that, we were made to become not only a fine new academic program, but a Bonafide grant-making authority. Impressive stuff. And the applications were quite astute indeed. I called Heather at the Foundation right straight away. (I notice she’s started answering my calls by saying, “What?” I can’t imagine why.) ((I really am joking, of course. Heather is always lovely to talk to. And if you’re reading this, Heather, please don’t cut our funding. Please?)) But when I told her I had a good reason for calling this time, and told her of our great success, she was just pleased as punch, and not for nothing neither. Because I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. (Because, by golly, this newsletter just ain’t long enough.). Community colleges don’t financially support student researchers. Like ever. This was a seriously innovative idea, and with very little time to implement, we’ve demonstrated proof of concept. Next year, if the Foundation is on board, and I feel certain that they will be, we’ll open the applications in the fall. For a great many students, I think this program will serve as a serious motivator to engage in a research experience. And man oh man does it ever look good on a CV.

So that was about the best Monday any UR practitioner could ask for. But then, there’s more. And here’s where I begin to question my relationship to reality. Little more than twelve hours later, I did find myself, inexplicably, where else but on the radio, talking about UR, of all thing (But, of course, what else?), on the Greg Tish Show. (But haven’t you heard of TSC Tuesday?) “Dan on the radio?” You might be asking in consternation. “Talking about UR, of all things? How on earth could this have happened? And why???” Well, Occam’s razor, and all of that. Someone backed out at the last possible second, and I was the only one still in the office past COB on a Monday evening. That’s how. But…and I must stress this point…I could not have found a warmer reception from Greg and his producer, Mattie Rowe, both TSC alums, who were genuinely enthralled by all of the opportunities that our little UR program is now offering to students. As TSC alums themselves, they immediately grasped the value of what we’re doing here, and it was good to get a reminder of just how significant that is, which is, of course, nothing less than leveling the playing field of higher education, offering experiences that historically were restricted to the rarified cohort of students privileged enough to study at an R1 institution, never mind that UR is just about the most powerful best practice in higher education, based on decades of research now. Dare I say they were a little jealous of our current students? I think that just might have been the case. And that is a powerful indicator that what we are doing is far greater than coordinating some niche student activity. This is a cause well worth all the effort that we might invest into it. Anyway, if you want to listen to a couple of the most entertaining radio hosts you’ll ever meet nerd out on UR for half an hour (and trust me, you do), pop on over to the following link, and give it a listen:

https://tinyurl.com/yj32xfas

And then, as if all of that wasn’t enough good news, late on Tuesday afternoon, symposium abstract submissions, which had been sitting stubbornly at around 10 or so for weeks on end, started suddenly ticking rapidly upward which, certainly not coincidentally, followed on the heels of the Public Relations and Workshops Committee’s third and final abstract writing workshop of the academic year. What’s more, they haven’t stopped coming in since. Now, still days out from the deadline, the total count of abstracts submitted is sitting right at 41, for the moment. Who knows what the final count will be, but that is a record-breaking number of submissions at this point in the process, with still five calendar days to go before the deadline. This excellent showing strongly suggests that our sustained communications throughout the year have had a significant positive impact, at least in terms of keeping the symposium top of mind for a great many students and faculty. On another note, it strongly suggests that we may just have a whole lot of abstracts to review in the coming weeks, so let’s do our level best to keep some time open in our schedules between next Thursday, February 13, and Friday, February 21. Whatever happens, it is now known that there will be a significant number of abstracts to review during that time.

All of this is assuming, of course, that this week ever happened at all. Let me know your thoughts? And while I await them, I think I’m due for a nice, restorative nap. Then, when I awake, I hope that I don’t find that all of this was just a very pleasant dream. I think not? Nay, I think this all might be turning out just as we had planned. Maybe even better. And there’s much to look forward to. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Dan