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