Scholars' Day Application (Students) Scholars' Day Application (Faculty)
Students, faculty, and staff at MCC are invited to submit proposals to showcase their work. We are looking for proposals from the entire spectrum of scholarly and creative work associated with the MCC community. Applications must be submitted electronically using one of the forms linked above. An application will require an MCC e-mail address, an abstract, and at least a tentative title. Student applications will also require a faculty mentor (mentors do not co-present if the student is competing for scholarship funds, but may otherwise). Applicants eligible for a scholarship will be required to submit an annotated bibliography in the weeks prior to Scholars' Day, and we may require additional material for consideration of scholarship awards. Please submit one application for each proposal. We look forward to your submissions.
An abstract is a single-paragraph, self-contained summary of the proposed presentation. See the Scholars' Day Abstract Evaluation Rubric to learn more about how the abstracts will be reviewed by the committee. A rubric ensures that all student abstracts are evaluated using a common set of standards.
An abstract for Scholars' Day should be a grammatically correct, coherent, and condensed summary of the entire presentation. Abstracts will be used to make decisions about acceptance or rejection of a presentation or performance. We understand that abstracts are likely being submitted prior to finalizing the presentation, so we request that you describe anticipated results, conclusions, or whatever is yet unfinished. Students may be asked for clarification of their intended project or specific parts of the abstract that are unclear. We also may ask you to revise your abstract after acceptance and prior to Scholars' Day. Final abstracts will appear in the printed and digital program for Scholars' Day.
Scholars' Day abstracts must be between 100 and 200 words in length.
Abstracts are currently submitted in plain text on the online application form. If you copy/paste from a Microsoft Word document, special formatting and special characters may get lost or corrupted; we recommend either using "save as" to create a plain text or ASCII file or first pasting your abstract into a plain text editor (such as WordPad, NotePad, TextEdit), and then edit it there and paste that version into the application form. If you would like formatting such as italics added to your abstract prior to inclusion in the event program, you will have an opportunity to inform us.
Abstracts are not introductions to the presentation or scripts for the presentation, but are summaries of the whole project condensed into a single paragraph. The writing style of abstracts in many fields tends to be terse; very straightforward descriptions are included, while adjectives that affect a tone are generally excluded. (Consider yourself professionally describing your project from beginning to end in one paragraph, providing your audience with an overview and a taste of the project's attraction.) The typical structure of an abstract is a sentence or two describing the main topic or thesis, a few sentences describing methodology (if applicable) or the heart of the project, and a sentence or two describing results or conclusions, further speculation, etc.
As part of the judging that will determine scholarship prizes for the best presentations at Scholars’ Day, we require that you submit a short annotated bibliography of sources that have informed your work, briefly describing how those sources informed or are incorporated into your work.
See the MCC Libraries' Citing Your Sources guide for links to guidance on using APA or MLA style. See the MCC Libraries' Annotated Bibliographies guide for tips on preparing this style of bibliography.
More brief descriptions and examples of annotated bibliographies:
If your project is a group effort, please submit only one document representing the group. If you have more than three sources as part of your project, limit your list to two to three for this annotated bibliography assignment. If you are presenting more than one project at Scholars’ Day, you must submit one annotated bibliography and reflection for each presentation that is competing for scholarship funds. The annotated bibliography will be reviewed and graded, and the score will be a part of the overall scholarship scoring. (If you are not eligible for the scholarship competition, then no submission is required.)