Resources for SoReMo Fellows
Spring 2021, updated Fall 2022.
Introductory presentation
Here is a guideline to what to present during your first presentation at the Forum:
- What is the project about?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- Who are the participants?
- Why is the project important?
- What are the potential impacts?
- What method do you think you will be using?
- “Think” because this initial presentation is an opportunity for various faculty and subject matter experts (SMEs) to plug in, get involved, reach out to you, and offer guidance in a technical are that you project may benefit from utilizing.
Objective
In the first presentation, your job is describe the idea, motivation, and basic proposal, and the rest of the semester you’ll work with mentors and experts who will help you along.
Slides templates
You may, but don’t have to, use this IIT Google slides template for your presentation. If you are curious you can view two of the intro slides here: COMING SOON
Progress reports and bimonthly check-ins
Master document for organizing your references
Here is a resource that Angela Petrone, a Spring 2023 Fellow, provided to the group: a Google document she called ‘Master document’ in which she kept track of all the research links and tasks she is carrying out and, most importantly, an organized bibliography. This will be super helpful in preparation of the final technical report, as the citations for the report need to be organized similarly. Here is a link to document and PDF version.
Progress report slides
What should you “present” at check-ins? Really, a summary of where you are, so that both you and the audience of advisors and peers can help identify any issues in your project early on, and help resolve them.
Here is a good example of one Fellow’s Forum slides; the starting point for these slides was a Google slides template: the template is under Google Slides Templates > Work > Case study.
Final presentation dry-runs
This presentation is a ‘warm-up’ for the final one, and only Illinois Tech participants will be invited. Others only if they are critical advisors and you and/or they feel like they need to be present.
Thus, there is less of a need to motivate the project again. You may assume everyone who is in the audience has seen your initial presentation. At the same time, keep in mind it’s been a couple of months, so do have a slide that overviews the problem setup again.
Here are the main questions to address:
- What problem was I solving and why?
- Topic, area, major, methods, findings?
- What issue related to social justice or equity was proposed to be solved or addressed? How?
- What issue related to social justice or equity was not solved or addressed? Why?
In a nutshell, your job during this presentation is to discuss issues, challenges, solutions, roadblocks, innovative ideas etc. that come out of the completed project, to this broad, multidisciplinary audience.
Objective
- Obtain any last-minute feedback, get any possible red flags raised now, before the final-final public presentation.
- Ensure that core SoReMo faculty have no fundamental questions they feel are unanswered at the end.
- Practice delivering the final presentation.
Final presentation - a public event
This event will be open to the public. It is our goal to have as many external attendees as possible. ## Objectives
By showcasing your completed work in the context of this program and reflecting on what you’ve done throughout the semester, we aim to: * Highlight your amazing work; * Inspire future student projects; * Invite future (corporate/government/NGO/academic) partners; * Spark new ideas for collaboration.
What to put in your slides
Here are the main questions to address in your presentation:
- What problem was I solving and why?
- Topic, area, major, methods, findings?
- What issue related to social justice or equity was proposed to be solved or addressed? How?
- What issue related to social justice or equity was not solved or addressed? Why?
- What additional interdisciplinary approaches would the project have benefited from \(\leftarrow\) utilize feedback from SMEs to answer this, if appropriate.
- Identify future developments, start-ups, community benefits that can be taken one step further.
More info….
COMING SOON
Tip: Make sure you boil down the technical challenges from your field to be understandable by everyone.
Technical report
Tasks
Each fellow is usually expected to complete two tasks:
- Write a report;
- Peer review another
Throughout the semester, Fellows work on the technical part of their project and are expected to engage with other participants, collaborate, etc. In the end, each usually also completes a peer review of other students’ presentations and tech reports.
The technical report for the project focusing on social responsibility, including key issues that have been / remain to be addressed (from the point of view of project extension / future work), are to be submitted, reviewed, and published in the SoReMo Journal hosted by Illinois Tech’s Galvin Library.
Objectives
The goal of the report is two-fold:
- Offer a high-level executive summary of the project, and
- Offer a detailed view into the technical aspects of the project.
The first part is expected to be understandable by anyone - a high school senior, a faculty member within and outside the main project discipline, and a family member not affiliated with a university. The second part is expected to be understandable by an informed reader from an academic field related to that of the project, so that another student or faculty member in the future could gain enough information in order to build on this project in the future.
Think of this as a solution blueprint that could, one day, be turned into a product (with help of Kaplan Institute program? Faculty & students jointly). Also think of it as an exercise in academic writing for a general audience.
Structure
Your document needs to have at least two main sections.
1. Executive summary
This section, expected to be no more than two pages in length, needs to clearly address the following questions.
The “why\(\to\)how\(\to\)what” of your project:
- What is the project about?
- problem you are addressing;
- why it is relevant / important;
- why is it challenging – either for society or within your discipline (answer what is most appropriate for your project, at best, answer both!);
- Who are the stakeholders? Participants?
- who does the project affect;
- who is a critical participant;
- who can benefit in the end;
- What is the project topic, area, major, methods?
- not everyone has any idea about the tools you are using. It is extremely important to set the stage for the audience. For example, if you are doing statistical modeling of social networks, you need to define what is a social network, and what is a statistical model, and why does anyone connect these two concepts (what’s the idea behind the area within which your problem is embedded). As another example, if you are studying an effect of A on B (or their relationship) via an observational study, you need to explain what this relationship means in practice in society, and what it means in technical terms within a discipline.
- What are the key findings?
- did you discover any new patterns?
- do you have a proposal for society (or your neigborhood or your micro-society)?
- do you have a policy recommendation?
- etc.
- What issue related to social justice or equity was solved or
addressed? How?
- The most exciting message! :)
- What issue related to social justice or equity was not
solved or addressed? Why?
- Identify any roadblocks or issues. This is equally as important as the above!
2. Technical details
This section does not have a length restriction. You should feel free to write as much details as you find necessary to explain the technical backbone of your project. Some example things to consider:
- Project timeline. When did you begin? when did you finish? what are some major time points and events that shaped your project - say, you got data, or you made a discovery, or you had to change course…
- Context. Within your field of research (or within the area of this project), how does one typically approach the problem, from what you’ve seen? Did you follow the usual? Did you use any out-of-the-box software, tools, sites, etc.?
- Data. Did you collect data? What was the process like? Did you design a survey? How did you do so? Etc.
- Hands-on: analyses. What kinds of (non)technical analyses did you do?
- Conclusions. Write all conclusions clearly. And assumptions. These are meant to be technical conclusions that translate directly to the high-level conclusions you wrote in the executive summary.
3. Bibliography
You must cite any and all resources used throughout your project. You should cite each reference in the text above where appropriate and list the full bibliographic entry here in this section. Each Fellow is expected to follow the style guidelines for his/her/their discipline. If you are not sure how to do this, please reach out to a (SoReMo) faculty member for help!
4. Appendix
Additional analyses, figures, tables, code, any other parts of the ‘report’ you want to preserve and be able to point to, but do not fit in the main project storyline narrative.
Formatting
template - .md or .tex, if those are your choices. coming soon.
Appendix
What is the format of this document?
This document was created using R Markdown. You can read
more about it here and check
out a cheat
sheet here, which will guide you through installing RStudio, and
from there the moment you create a new .Rmd document, it
will be a working template to start from. If you are used to using
LaTeX, no worries: it can be embedded into
Markdown, with overall simpler formatting. I hope you find
this useful!
Notes
This document is work in progress. The first iteration was made to help the inaugural class of fellows prepare for final presentation & project reports.
License
This document was first created for SoReMo Fellows in Spring 2021. The materials listed here are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
