Donald & Gudrun Fruehling Undergraduate Research Fellowship

Applicants should review the proposal requirements and submission guidelines below before completing the fellowship application. 

Upload the materials outlined below as part of your application. Your research proposal should be typed, double-spaced and no more than 750 words. Retain the section headings, listed below, to help reviewers evaluate your proposal.

Title of proposal.

Proposal description. As faculty from various disciplines will review your proposal, please take care to explain your project in a clear and understandable way with minimal jargon. Include the following six points, along with the headers intact for organization purposes and ease of evaluation:

1. Background and problem statement. Begin with several paragraphs that draw the reader into the project. Describe the problem you are investigating, set that problem in a context, indicate its importance, and show how your study will contribute to an understanding of the stated problem.
    
2. Review of literature. Summarize research relevant to your problem. Cite (in proper APA or comparable style) and discuss three to five important sources. Demonstrate how your study relates to and builds upon the ideas that you discuss from the relevant research. 
    
3. Objectives. List the primary goals and objectives of your research.  If you have a hypothesis or questions you are specifically trying to answer, they should be listed and discussed in this section.
    
4. Methodology. Projects can be of many types: archival or otherwise text-based, data analysis, design, formal-analytic, experimental, qualitative analysis, etc. It is important that you discuss how your methodology fits your problem statement and meets your objectives. For projects involving human subjects, be sure to describe, in detail, the population you plan to work with and the design of your project (e.g., interviews, surveys, participant observation). Explain how you plan to gain trust and/or access to your participants and the kind of environment in which your research will take place. Include examples of survey instruments and interview questions if they will be used in your study. 
    
5. Timeline. Provide an estimation of when essential benchmarks will be met. Benchmarks include, but are not limited to, a complete literature review, a well-designed methodology, satisfactory collection of data, the critical examination and analysis of the data, a discussion of the results of the data analysis, concluding remarks or statement, and submission of the completed project.
    
6. Plans to present or publish your findings. All recipients will present their research at the CSBS Inspire Research Conference in April. If you plan to publish your results, indicate journals that might accept your article. Note: When presenting or publishing research, you are required to indicate that partial funding was obtained from CSBS.

Does this project require IRB approval? True or False.

• If true, please include a copy of your Human Participants Approval letter from the IRB with you listed as the primary investigator to this proposal. 
• If IRB approval is pending, please include a copy of your IRB application. 
• If false, clearly state why it does not require IRB approval.

Copy of most recent transcript.