 Well, hello everybody. My name is Mark Handbelt. I'm the Associate Dean for Students in Enrollment here in the Faculty of Public Affairs. Welcome to our information session on CUROV. I'm going to sort of say a little bit about the program. I'm not going to talk for very long. And then really the point of this is just to open this up for questions and to give you an opportunity to ask any questions that you have about this program. And if you want to, there's sort of several ways you can ask questions. You can either turn on your camera and ask the question yourself or if you want to put it in the chat function. I think Stephanie who's monitoring this can monitor the chat function and we can have questions that way. So it's however your most comfortable. But I just wanted to say that I mean CUROV is a program that I'm really excited about. I've had the opportunity to serve as a CUROV supervisor before where a student who worked with me was successful in getting a CUROV internship I should say. And now as Associate Dean this is a program that falls within my portfolio. And it really is an exciting program because when it does it offers you the opportunity to design a research project on your own and then to have the opportunity through the summer to pursue that project under the guidance of a supervisor. And of course also to receive a stipend to do that. So you have the opportunity basically to devote yourself full time for those four months to a research project of your own design. I think it's really exciting that way. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to talk through basically an overview of the program. Then I'll talk a little bit about finding a supervisor. And then I will talk a little bit about the proposal, the one page proposal that you need to submit as part of your application. And when I'm done with that we'll open it up to questions. So as a general overview of the program what happens is you need to submit an application this month. So the deadline for applications is February the 28th. All of this information is on the CUROP website. So you can get it there quite easily. But what you need to submit you need to submit a one page proposal for your project. Also your CV, your transcript and your supervisor will submit a letter of reference on your behalf. Those candidates who are successful will have the opportunity to do their project basically between May and August. So you have that four month window there. And the idea is that this is a project that you would devote yourself to full time. So it's really a full-time research project. And as I said at the beginning or as I'm sure you've seen on the website there is a stipend attached to this of $7,500 that you would receive throughout the summer. Once you get to the end of the summer and your research is complete there will be an output from your project and this will have been stipulated in your proposal. So some people might do a policy brief, some people might do a research paper, there's a range of different outputs that could come out of this. But what we ask you to submit in September is a two-page abstract of your completed research. So that we have a two-page abstract of what it is that you've completed over the summer, what it is that you've achieved. And then in the fall we hold our CuroP showcase. And the CuroP showcase is where you have the opportunity to invite friends and family and I'm there and the deans there and the faculty supervisors are there and it's a showcase event that where each of the CuroP researchers presents their work and presents their findings and then there's an opportunity for you to take questions from the audience and it's a really wonderful event. Under normal circumstances we like to do this in person. Of course we're operating under slightly different circumstances right now. So we held our CuroP showcase this year in the fall on Zoom and it was a very successful event. It was really exciting to hear about all these different projects and also for the supervisors to have the opportunity to speak about the students who'd worked with them. So that's basically the overview of the program, the applications this month, the research is conducted between May and August, in September you're submitting an abstract of what you've done and then we have this CuroP showcase in the fall that brings the program close. So one of the things that you are required to do as part of this is to find a faculty supervisor. For some people this is very easy and very obvious to do. For some people it can be more of a challenge. So what I would say, I mean the first thing is to recognize that while you certainly would look for a faculty supervisor who had research expertise in the field that you want to research, it's really important that the CuroP project is your project. This is a student-driven initiative and it's an undergraduate student-driven initiative. It's an opportunity for you to earn funding for your own research project. So you don't need to find a supervisor who necessarily works on exactly the same type of project that you work on. But you do want someone who has research expertise in the field who's able to give you guidance, both guidance in terms of conducting your so subject matter expertise. How do you go about finding a supervisor? Well sometimes you will have taken courses with someone who's a very obvious candidate as a supervisor and you can approach them. All of the departments have faculty webpages where faculty members have profiles and then those profiles will have mention of their research areas. You can look there. If you're still struggling you can contact the chair of the department and tell them you're interested in applying for CuroP and you're wondering if they have any suggestions of who you might approach as a faculty supervisor. When you approach a supervisor you know I think that there's sort of two things to keep in mind. One is that these are the kinds of projects that in general I think faculty members really enjoy working on. They really enjoy the opportunity to work with a student on a project the student is really excited about and the student has designed. But you want to make sure that your approach is somewhat structured right so you don't want to just send an email to a professor saying hey professor so-and-so I want to apply for CuroP will you be my supervisor. Much better to have something that you can show them to give them a clear sense of what it is that you want to do. So one suggestion would be to have a good draft of the one-page proposal that you can send to a supervisor and then you can say you know I'm considering applying for this funding opportunity here's a draft of the proposal that I'm interested in submitting would it be possible to meet to discuss this opportunity or do you have any suggestions. And if you approach the faculty member that way it gives the faculty member the opportunity to have some input into shaping your proposal so you're not telling them that here's my final proposal this is what I'm submitting you're you are looking for their guidance and I can certainly tell you that when I worked with a student in this program we did work together to hone the the proposal to to to get it to the point where where it was ultimately submitted. But it's a way of starting a conversation it's a way of telling a professor that you're really interested in their area of expertise that that you would like to do your own research in that area that you have some ideas about how the type of research you want to do so you're not just showing up you know sort of spitballing here you have you have some ideas about what you want to do but you're also really open to their input and their help in in terms of shaping the project. I'm sure that it can be intimidating to to send an email to a faculty member that you've never met. I think all that I can do on that front is is to try and reassure you that as faculty members you know these are the kinds of emails that we really enjoy receiving and these are the kinds of projects that or the kinds of programs that we really enjoy participating in and if what you're telling your supervisor is that you're really interested in their area of research and is something you'd like to pursue I don't think there are very many professors who are going to be at all put out by receiving that sort of email so you know have some confidence that that your your professors will will receive these sorts of applications they may not be able to supervise you they may not you know they may not have the time to do available they may be too booked to do it but but certainly the the request will be well received. Okay the last thing I wanted to talk about was the proposal and and writing these proposals can be a challenge and you know I can tell you that many graduate students even many faculty members struggle sometimes with writing these kinds of research proposals so there's no one model that works there are there are multiple ways of doing these types of proposals but I want to warn you against a couple of things and also give you some suggestions about how to think about writing a proposal. The key here is to remember that you have one page there's oftentimes a temptation I think to want to tell a long narrative about how you got to or how you arrived at your research interests and so there's a temptation to write you know ever since I was young I've been interested in X, Y and Z and then I went to high school and I had this professor and this professor was so influential and they had us do this project and I got more and more interested in the subject matter so when I came to university this was the first thing that I wanted to study and then I went well before you know it you're on to page six and you haven't even told your profile you haven't even started telling us what the proposal is bad so I strongly encourage you to avoid the long narrative you start at the end right you start with the punchline a professor of mine once told me when I was an undergraduate that the difference between academic writing and writing a mystery novel is that when you write a mystery novel and your reader gets partway through it and says wow this is fascinating I can't wait to find out how it ends up you've probably written a wonderful mystery novel and if you're writing an academic piece and your writer is halfway through it thinking wow this is fascinating I can't wait to find out how it ends you're probably a lot more trouble and I repeat that anecdote at nauseam to all of my students but I think it there's a lot of wisdom in it you need to give away the punchline right at the beginning you need to tell your your reader what this project is about right at the beginning and I think that there are three things that that you want to have really clear in your proposal the first is what is your question what is the research question that drives your project good scholarship is about questions it's not about answers so if you can defend your question at the beginning whatever the answer whatever the answer that comes out of your project is going to be valuable from a scholarly point of view if you can say here's a valuable question here's something that's worth asking then the answer whatever it is is going to be valuable so the three things that you want then very very clearly in your proposal are what is my question and you want your question phrased as precisely and as succinctly as possible secondly what is the significance of this question why is this an important question why should we care about the answer to this question what's at stake in answering this question and third what is your method and method very simply is how are you going to go about answering this question what's the method is you know method is a word that we get hung up on a lot but very simply method is how you do what you do so you're going to do something in this project how in as specific and precise terms as possible how are you going to do it when you're thinking about your project there there are sort of two polls that you want to stay in between on the one poll um is the question of significance right what's at stake here what's how how significant is this as a question but on the other side of that is feasibility are you able to get this project done in the four months that you have to get it done and where projects tend to go off the rails a little bit is when they fall too far to one side or the other of that spectrum so you know you could have the save the world kind of project a project that talks about all the ways in which you know studying this field is going to transform the ways in which human beings live on this earth and that would be wonderful except you have four months to get this done right and on the other side of the equation if you tend too far towards feasibility what you get is a project that is is laid out in very clear steps and you know absolutely this can get done in four months except the significance is so narrow and so fine that you have all of you know your readers looking at you saying well why are we asking this question why would this be worth doing um so you want to fall somewhere in the middle there you want to be able to say here's why this is significant here's what's at stake here but also here's my method in really clear terms and here's how I show that really I can get this done in the four months that I have to work and one of the things that I think is very helpful in thinking about how to navigate that is to think about this project as one project one step you know down a long road of the interests or or the the questions that drive you as a scholar so if you think about what are the big big questions that drive me as a scholar and think about that as sort of a big pie or a big circle right here here are the big questions and the questions we're talking about here you know questions that would take a lifetime of study to explore and at the end of the day you still wouldn't have a complete answer to but what are those big big questions that drive you as a scholar and then think about you know what's a really specific or precise wedge that I can drive into that one question that I can that I can ask that I can answer in a four month project that can take us some ways some step down the road towards answering those much much bigger questions I think if you think about your project that your proposal that way and think about it as that one step or that one little wedge that we're driving into this much bigger set of questions you can wind up with a proposal that's both manageable or feasible within that four month period but also has real significance and your reader can read your proposal and say okay I understand why we're doing this project I understand what we can start to better understand or what we can understand more fully or in a different light than we would have otherwise okay so that's about all that I have to say about the project the proposal sorry the program that's the word I was looking for that's what I have to say about the program as I say I think this is a really exciting program I'm really pleased to see you here interested in it and I am happy to take any questions that you have so you can either do those by by turning on your camera and asking the question or you can post something in the chat I will say that the the website that we have is is quite extensive and and answers I think a lot of questions about the program the one thing I would I would just flag for you and I only noticed it this morning is that there are a few errors in the frequently asked questions the FAQ section and those are just very small errors around the dates that the dates that are posted our last year's dates so just be careful with that but but apart from that there is a lot of information there okay I do have a question in the chat does the supervisor have to be part of the faculty public affairs no they don't you can have a faculty you can have a faculty member from another unit in the university they do have to be a permanent faculty member but the key is that you as a student your your eligibility is determined by your faculty okay another question and by the way I should also say to those of you who are posting in the chat if I don't answer your question fully or if somehow I've missed something please don't hesitate to add a question there to get me to expand next question is the program designed to be for students with previous formal research experience or is it designed for students with little or no previous experience the expectation here is that you've completed your second year of your undergraduate program so that is a certain amount of formal training but beyond that and beyond the minimum grade point average no there's no requirement that that you have previous experience as a paid researcher um so if you have questions about how to um how to formulate a research project or if you have questions about research methodologies those are questions that you can raise with your supervisor and those are the kinds of skills that you can develop through this program so one of the things that we're asking for as part of your proposal is that you talk about the skills that you will learn you will develop or you anticipate learning or developing through this program if for example you you know you you have an interest in going to graduate school and and you would like to do survey methodology but you've never done it before and there's a lot to learn there and this kind of program is is where you can start to develop some of those skills in conjunction with a supervisor okay I hope that answered that question okay the next question was about accomplishment but I think the answer the question is answered second year and the minimum GPA that's right how many students are selected in past years we've had 10 cure-up fellows how do you determine if a faculty member is permanent good question so sometimes it's more or less obvious on your on on a faculty page but there there are two sort of broadly speaking there are two categories of faculty members that we have at the university those who are hired to teach individual courses and those who are hired on a permanent basis and the people who are hired on a permanent basis will have a title like assistant professor or associate professor or professor so those are the people who you would need to approach as a potential supervisor and if you have questions about the status of a potential supervisor you can simply ask them they'll be able to answer that question for you to clarify do PhD candidates or associate professors count as full-time so associate professors do and PhD candidates do not so a permanent faculty member would be someone who is either as I said an assistant professor an associate professor or a professor so what do you suggest is the best strategy for approaching a faculty member so I think that the one of the one of the things that's challenging in the COVID environment is around communication right because we can't bump into people in hallways the way we're used to we don't there isn't that opportunity to speak to a professor briefly at the front of a lecture hall at the end of a class or to knock on their door during an office hour but the so we do have to do everything by email and and your approaches will be by email what I suggest is is that you approach a professor with a relatively short initial introduction it will depend of course on whether or not you're a previous or an existing relationship with that professor if you already know each other well that you're approaching a professor or with whom you've had very limited interaction or maybe you've never had any kind of sort of direct interaction you would want to send a brief email that introduces yourself it says you're you know you're interested in applying for a curop fellowship and or curop internship I should say and that you know you've you've read this this professor's faculty page or you know you've read something that they've written or or however it is that you've ascertained that you think this person would be a really good supervisor and you'd like to discuss with them the possibility of supervising your project as I said before I think I would include a draft of your proposal you send it to them and you ask you know would it be possible to meet via zoom or online to talk about this project and then you know you do have to wait a little bit the next question is sort of related to this thing I approached a few professors with a draft proposal but there's been no response I think there there's sort of two sides to answering that question on the one hand you know we do have to recognize that that everybody is working under very difficult circumstances right now and and sort of time pressures the amount of time that we're spending in front of our computers the amount of time that that we have to dedicate to email traffic so so I think that you know you have to be a little bit accommodating and allowing somewhat a little bit of time to read the proposal and to think about it but on the other hand you know you you as a student have have interests and that matter and there's also timelines that matter in terms of finding a supervisor so I would say that if you've if you've sent your proposal to a professor I would give them a reasonable amount of time to respond you know at least sort of I don't know three three four days maybe something like that if you haven't reserved a response at that point I think it's perfectly legitimate to send a follow-up email and say you know dear professor so-and-so I sent an email a few days ago with with my proposal for cure-up I was wondering if you'd have an opportunity if you've had an opportunity to to look it over I would really be interested in in meeting with you or talking with you about this opportunity of course professors have the opportunity have the option of saying no but you may well find that if professors have been unresponsive it's it has nothing to do with the quality of your proposal or their interest in supervising but is simply that that you know your email has been lost in the pile that has come in that day I would not be I would I would not suggest that you be too too accommodating I mean if you haven't heard from someone in a week I wouldn't expect that they are going to miraculously answer you you know a week and a half later I think I think if you've waited a reasonable amount of time you're perfectly entitled to or perfectly within your rights to just send them a follow-up email it's just just a short polite email to to ask if they've had a chance to read the proposal so next question if accept is something I can use on my resume yes absolutely and so so what you have here is something that's potentially I would think really valuable on a on a resume because this would be a proposal this would be a project that you had designed on your own and for which you had applied successfully for funding so so this is you know you would be able to say that as an undergraduate student you had successfully applied for funding for a research project of your own design which in the academic world is is a pretty significant accomplishment I don't see any other questions coming in let's see here the supervisor have to be from faculty public affairs no they do not so the supervisor can be from another faculty at the university your eligibility for the program is determined by your faculty so so you have to be a faculty of public affairs student to qualify but but you're welcome to work with a supervisor from a different faculty so if you've approached a few faculty members and you're not getting positive response I think the I think the next step would be to contact the chair or the director of your department and to ask them if they have any suggestions for faculty members who might be interested in or might be willing to supervise your project one of the things about the faculty profiles that we have online is that unfortunately they're not always up to date and there are times when faculty members you know either have new projects or their research has moved in a slightly different direction and that that change isn't entirely reflected in the faculty profile that they have posted so it's entirely possible that what you're interested in is something that there is someone in the department working on that it's just not as visible online so so there would be someone who who could certainly help to point you in a direction of someone who you could approach with that finding a supervisor I certainly recognize can be you know for some it's a very easy and very obvious choice and for some it requires more work to identify someone as a potential supervisor and then to approach them and then have them read your work and then agree to agree to be a supervisor so you know it it's I don't think that there's any one I don't think that there's any one way to be successful you know there is a certain element of you know be yourself in in in how you approach someone but also don't don't hesitate to be a little persistent because as I said it is it is a really good opportunity and you know it's you want to make sure that you get an answer from faculty members you approach and if they are going to say no that you have the opportunity to approach other people as for the content of the research does it need to be program related so I assume by that that you mean the program in which you're enrolled is that right so for example if you were doing a if you were doing a okay so so if you're doing a political science degree let's say does your does your research have to be in political science is that that's the question not necessarily no I mean that what's what's required is that what's required is that your what's required is that you be enrolled in a program in in in our faculty I think that I'm trying I'm trying to think how to answer this question most effectively because I mean there's a lot of work that can be very interdisciplinary and in that case you know it might not fall squarely or or or cleanly within any you know it might have elements of let's say economics and elements of political science in it that would be perfectly fine can I be supervised by professor outside of Carlton no you do need to have a Carlton University supervisor for the project if you don't mind mark there's a question here too who is the chair of the faculty of public affairs and what is that person's contact information it's from Melissa so what mark was talking about earlier is that the chair for the department they're all different sometimes it can be hard to determine you can look on the Carlton website but positions do change sometimes at the end of this call I'll be posting my information so if you need help with anything you could just email me and I can direct you accordingly yeah well that's that's great and each each unit in the faculty has its own website and has a contact section on the website and so if you're looking for you know the chair of economics or the director of social work or whatever it is they're they're identified on the website for each one of those units okay when we talk about faculty of public affairs we're talking about the faculty as a whole so the the the body that that contains within it all of these different units okay so such as the department of political science the department of economics the school of social work journalism and communications all of these units that are part of the faculty of public affairs um for example I mean economic oh so this was related to the subject matter so if you're in economics and and you want to do research that's not specifically within economics but you are a faculty of public affairs student sure you could you could you could propose a project with with a supervisor and and and apply absolutely yes and and for everyone here just just do make sure that you have a look in the chat function um Stephanie has just posted her contact information and if you have any questions at all um by all means you can contact Stephanie and if you can't access the chat Stephanie's the person that sent you the information for the zoom call so if you even even want to reply to that email that's perfectly fine there we go does anyone have any other questions are there any any other questions anything at all okay well um I hope that uh I mean I hope that you you are all leave this uh meeting motivated to apply I hope you all submit applications um like I said I I think this is a wonderful program and it's uh and really a wonderful opportunity I can tell you that that I I wish that there had been an opportunity like this when I was an undergraduate it uh it's pretty exciting so good luck to all of you um and as Stephanie said if you have any questions about the program please feel free to contact her um and she or I um will be able to get back to you with answers okay all right well have a great day everybody enjoy the rest of the day and like I said good luck with your applications