Senior Sequence

IMPORTANT UPDATES

Dear Students,

Here are a few updates for you.

SCIVEE POSTERCAST

If you want your poster printed by Tracey Hughes at the Geisel Library GIS Lab, you need to turn in your proficiency report or the GIS tutorial by Feb. 19. For details see: http://ucsd.libguides.com/content.php?pid=42741&sid=553328

SciVee Registration Instructions. The deadline for completing your poster and SciVee postercase is fast approaching: March 9, 2010. You should aim to get it done before that so not everyone in the class bogs down the SciVee server at the last minute. Here are the instructions for getting your SciVee registration and free license to do a postercast.
• Go to http://www.scivee.tv/ and click register in the top right corner to create a new account.
• Use your Senior Sequence username and e-mail address to create your SciVee profile (if you don’t know what that is you can find it here:  http://www.seniorsequence.net/images/uploads/SenSeq_username-email_2010.pdf
• SciVee will send you an email to complete the registration process

*If your username is already taken on SciVee, create a similar one. Then tell Professor Pezzoli you had to make this change, and send him your new username (plus the email you used): .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
*If you have trouble registering please contact Willy Suwanto at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
*The deadline for SciVee registration is February 22, 2010 at 5pm. Ken Liu will come into class on Tuesday, Feb. 23 to answer any questions you may have about creating a poster cast. Be sure to come for that.

POSTER AWARDS.
Every year a distinguished panel of judges—from on and off campus—judge all the student posters put on display at our annual Urban Expo. The judges award 1st, 2nd and 3rd place cash prizes to the best posters. For details about poster and other awards see: http://www.seniorsequence.net/index.php/expo/awards/

FINAL VERSION OF YOUR SRP

Your next major assignment calls for the final version of your SRP (Feb. 25, 2020). Here are some tips with respect to turning your draft into an excellent final version. I came up with this list in consultation with the Saul and Lydia, your TAs.

COMMENTS
• Pay close attention to the comments you got on your draft. Indeed, when you turn in your final version we want you to include the draft you got back last week (this will enable us to track the comments you got and see to what extent you acted on them).  You may have gotten suggestions spelling out changes that you did not want to make, or could not make, for one reason or another. That’s fine. But if that happened, you need to submit a note with your final version explaining why (i.e., tell us why you did not incorporate the suggested change/improvement). If you responded to all the major comments then there is no need to submit a note of explanation.

RESEARCH DESIGN
• In your final version of your SRP, be sure to explain the strengths and weaknesses of your SRP’s research design/methods. The idea here is not to give us a blow by blow description of what makes a particular method useful, reliable, or valid in general terms (e.g., like you might read in a text book explaining the strengths and weakness of a wide range of methods). Rather, your task here is to highlight for your reader those points they need to know about the strengths and limitations of the methods you used and how you used them. Here is where you’d acknowledge,  for instance,  that the sampling design you used can only tell us so much given the constraints of the data collection, or that your interviews admittedly have selection bias, or that your observations were partial. You can also tell the reader when some of your data is particularly good –as in you managed to get access to otherwise difficult to get resources/archives/points of view/observations, etc.

INTRODUCTION
• The intro to your final SRP is very important. The intro should introduce the SRP topic and your question. Why is this important or interesting? Hit people over the head with your best stuff. Come right out with your key findings (a thumbnail sketch of them, as you need to do in your abstract too).
• While the original research component of the paper may be quite narrow in scope (e.g., a case study of a particular program), the introduction should frame the case in a broader context. The introduction also should give the reader an overview of the organization of the paper. There is a balance to be struck between what you include in the intro and the lit reveiw. These sections should be mutually reinforcing without being redundant. Make sure your introduction is an introduction to the SRP, not to the topic in general. Make sure you don’t provide such a broad background to the topic that it takes pages to get to your argument (this explains our limit of 2-3 pages). You should give a thumbnail sketch of where you’re going to go before you delve too deeply into background. Sometimes students do not give this thumbnail sketch because they expect the abstract to be doing that. Don’t consider the abstract as part of the paper, but rather a separate summary. (This can create a sense of deja vu when you read an abstract and then read the opening paragraphs of an article, but that’s ok.).

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
• Don’t just list your findings –make sure you include analysis and synthesis. Root your findings in the context of the questions/argument/issue your study aimed to address. Explain how your findings do or do not answer the questions you hoped to get at.

HONORS SEMINAR ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS AND APPLICATION PROCESS

If you seek honors as part of your USP major, you must apply for admission into the Spring quarter USP Honors Seminar. Taking the Seminar in and of itself does not guarantee honors—that depends on your performance in the seminar. To be eligible for honors you must have a 3.5 (or higher) GPA in the USP major. You must also have a 3.5 or higher GPA to enroll in the Honors Seminar (plus permission of the instructor).

To enroll in the Honors Seminar, please assemble the application material outlined on the class website. The deadline to submit your application is Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010.  You can turn it in to Professor Pezzoli in class or turn it in to Valorie Bruce in SSB 315 . http://www.seniorsequence.net/index.php/honors/