January 30, 2015

Registration for the 2015 Student Symposium at Ball State University has been extended through Friday, February 6th!

Don't miss this opportunity to present your work in either a poster/media display or paper format in a FREE academic conference right here on campus.

Reasons why you should register for the Student Symposium at Ball State University:

  • Registration is free! The costs of registering for academic conferences can often range into the hundreds of dollars. Here you have an opportunity to present and attend a well respected and established conference free of charge. (Did you know this was the 20th annual Student Symposium?)
  • No travel time or expenses! Another large expense for those wishing to attend and present at academic conferences is the expense of travel. Since the Student Symposium is right here on campus you don't incur any of those expenses.
  • It looks good on your resume/CV! Building your credentials while still in school is a great way to advance your career. 
  • Your work doesn't have to be completed! We're in the middle of the semester and your work on a project may not be finished yet, we get that. All that we ask is that you have enough work done to explain your ideas, methods, and expected outcomes.
  • If you've never presented before this is a great first conference! At the Student Symposium you can learn what goes into preparing your work for public presentation, see what others have prepared for their presentations, and get feedback from your peers and University faculty and administrators.
  • If you have presented before, this is still a great conference! You can never have too much experience. The Student Symposium is a great place to refine your presentation skills.
  • You get to attend the conference, too! While you are presenting at the Student Symposium you can also take a look at what other participants have brought to present. Maybe you'll find inspiration for your next big idea, or a future collaborator. There is no bigger gathering on campus of student researchers ready to talk about their work, and you get to be right in the middle of the action! 
  • We have slushy punch and cookies! Do we really need to explain why this is a good thing?
Visit the Student Symposium webpage for links to the 2015 guidelines and registration. We hope to see you there!

January 29, 2015

Upcoming Aspire Student Deadlines

SPRING SEMESTER DEADLINES! Are you in need of Research or Creative Arts funding for your projects? Are you traveling to present at a conference or professional meeting? Look no further than the Aspire Internal Grant Program:

BSU's ASPiRE Internal Grant Program supports student-initiated research, creative arts projects, and scholarly studies. Students may submit proposals for up to $300, for Research or Creative Arts project costs such as travel or supplies. All students presenting papers, posters, etc., at conferences or professional meetings can request $100 to defray travel costs.

AY 14-15 Aspire Student Program Spring deadlines:

Undergraduate Student Competitions:
. Research applications due: February 5, 2015
. Creative Arts applications due: February 12, 2015

Student Travel Grants: Applications due 15th of each month prior to travel date (for presentations of papers and/or posters, etc., at meetings or conferences)

For Program Guidelines, see:http://cms.bsu.edu/about/administrativeoffices/spo/aspire/studentprograms. Questions pertaining to the ASPiRE Program can be directed to aspire@bsu.edu or by calling the Sponsored Programs Office at 765-285-1600

January 27, 2015

Final Week of Student Symposium Registration!

Registration for the 20th Annual Student Symposium at Ball State University ends one week from today. Don't miss this opportunity to present your work in either a poster, media, or moderated paper presentation format in a professional conference setting right here on campus! The Student Symposium will take place Tuesday, March 31, 2015 in the Student Center.

Visit the Student Symposium webpage for more information and to register.
Also, check us out on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/studentsymposiumatbsu

Registration ends Monday, February 2nd, 2015.

January 13, 2015

The 20th Annual Student Symposium 2015 Official Poster

edited on 1/14/2015

Great Lakes 2015: Call for Proposals Deadline Extended to January 18th!

We invite everyone to submit symposia, roundtables, and posters related to counseling psychology and this year's conference theme of navigating the crossroads into the future and remaining engaged while responding to change. Subthemes include: Engagement, Health Psychology and Core Competencies, and Military/VA Psychology.


Friday and Saturday March 27 - 28, 2015

Ball State University
L. A. Pittenger Student Center
Muncie, IN

3 CEUs available for licensed psychologists and mental health counselors


Submit your proposals by January 18th, 2015.
Notification of acceptance or rejection will be on February 2nd, 2015.

Generously sponsored by:

Writing With a Heavy Teaching Load: Yes, you can ‘find time’ to write, but not without sacrifices. By Rob Jenkins in The Chronicle

Writing With a Heavy Teaching Load

Yes, you can ‘find time’ to write, but not without sacrifices

By Rob Jenkins, January 12, 2015
Reposted from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rachel Toor’s November column, "The Habits of Highly Productive Writers," clearly resonated with Chronicle readers, as it was one of the most popular articles on the site for several weeks. It’s easy to see why: The essay contains practical information for academics seeking to boost their written output, and approaches the topic in a way that, for me, makes the whole endeavor seem a bit less daunting. I can imagine many readers came away from her column thinking, "I can do this."
And yet, I can also imagine that a lot of full-time faculty members at community colleges and other teaching-focused institutions found themselves also thinking, "That would be nice—if only I had the time to write."
I’d like to follow up Rachel’s excellent column with an encouraging word of my own, aimed specifically at faculty members who, like me, have a heavy teaching load: You can find time to write, if that’s what you really want to do. It won’t be easy, but there are ways to manage a heavy teaching (and service) load and still write and publish more than you’re doing now.
I usually teach five courses every semester. And since my discipline is writing, that means a lot of grading. I also advise students, serve on a couple of committees, (mostly) attend the required meetings, staff the department booth at campus open houses—all the same things done by most faculty members at teaching-focused colleges. In addition, I have a family and a moderately active social life.
Despite all that, this past fall semester (just as an example), I wrote a weekly column for a local newspaper, along with my monthly installments of The Two-Year Track for The Chronicle and periodic blog posts for Vitae. In addition I published several essays in other venues, finished the last three chapters of my third book (due out in 2015), and submitted a proposal for Book No. 4. I also learned to speak Mandarin Chinese, cut a jazz album, and built a life-size replica of the Millennium Falcon out of Legos.
OK, I made up those last three. But I did write well over 50,000 words this past semester. I don’t say that to brag. On the contrary, my message is that if I can do it, so can you. I am not, by nature, an exceptionally hard-working or organized person. Like a lot of you, I suspect, I’d much rather be curled up somewhere with a good book.
But I decided several years ago that I was going to write, and so I started writing—and kept at it. You can do the same, even with a heavy teaching load, by following a few simple pieces of advice:
Commit. The first step—as with most other worthwhile things in life—is to decide that you really want to write and that you’re willing to make certain sacrifices to achieve that goal. Because the key to writing, just like exercise or dieting, is to (with apologies to Nike) just do it.
I’ve lost count of the number of colleagues who have said they would like to write a book—"someday" when they "have more time." One thing we learn as we age, though, is that there’s never going to be some magical point in the future when we suddenly find ourselves with an overabundance of spare time. On the contrary, as I’ve gotten older, life has gotten more complicated, not less.
If you want to write, you might as well start now. It’s not going to get any easier. Ten years from now, you can either still be saying that you’d like to start writing someday or you can be counting your publications.
Organize and prioritize. The next step is to arrange your life so that you can make time for writing. I’m not talking about scheduling your writing time (we’ll get to that in a moment). Before you even reach that point, you have to make sure you’re not letting other important things fall through the cracks.
Obviously, that includes teaching and its attendant responsibilities, such as grading and course prep. You can’t afford to let those duties slide at a teaching-oriented college, or else you might find yourself with more writing time on your hands than you wanted.
At the same time, certain mundane, familiar tasks can take over your life if you let them. So don’t let them. In addition to classes, office hours, and meetings, which are already scheduled, you also need to set aside specific times for grading, class prep, and so forth. Then keep to that schedule as closely as possible.
That may require some sacrifices or changes in your priorities. Remember I said that I serve on a couple of committees? Well, I used to serve on four or five, but I’ve scaled back in order to free up more time for writing. Of course, that’s easier to do for someone like me, who already has tenure and a fair amount of seniority, than it might be for people early in their careers. But to find time to write, you will undoubtedly have to jettison some other activities, as you’re able. (Some new faculty members take on far too much anyway; learning to say no sometimes is advantageous.)
This advice applies to your personal life, as well. If you’re like me, you don’t want to take any more time away from your family than necessary. But you may have to steal a few hours here and there if you want to write. Perhaps you can get up a little earlier in the morning. Maybe you can come home from the office a little later some days. Maybe you can find an hour or two on Saturday or Sunday morning while others in your household are still asleep. Again, you’re going to have to make some sacrifices, and family time and "me time" might be among them.
Schedule. There are two things in my life that I need to do but absolutely will not do unless I schedule them: exercise and writing.
Note that when I say "schedule," I mean that literally. I look at my calendar each week, with my classes, meetings, family commitments, etc., and block out segments of time when I’m going to write. (Just as I block out segments for exercise.) Three or four times a week, I try to set aside two-hour blocks of time to write. I know many experts say that you should write every day, and I don’t necessarily disagree. There are just some days when I don’t have any time to write—at all. But I’ve found that if I schedule blocks of time for writing, and hold them sacrosanct, I can generally use them productively.
That last sentence is key. Once you have looked at your calendar and scheduled time to write, that time must become inviolable, with the exception of family emergencies. (Your daughter forgetting her soccer cleats isn’t an emergency. She can wear her trainers or borrow a friend’s old pair for one day.)
As we all know, as soon as you sit down to write, it seems like dozens of things are suddenly competing for your attention, including Facebook and your cellphone. Those things can wait. For now, it’s time to write, so get to it.
If it helps, find a special place to write where you will face a minimum of distractions. I confess: I do a lot of my writing at McDonald’s. It has just the right ratio (for me) of peace-and-quiet to background noise. No one bothers me there, and Wi-Fi is available if I need it but too inconvenient to be a constant distraction. And, yes, I know I shouldn’t, but I like the fries.
Be patient. At first, writing in increments, in those relatively short blocks of time that you’ve set aside, may seem painfully slow. You might feel like you’re not getting anywhere, especially if you’re working on a book. Just be patient. Over time, you will be surprised at how quickly the pages stack up. The important thing, as many of you no doubt learned from writing a dissertation, is to be consistent.
When I wrote my first book, my schedule was such that I could devote only one hour a day to the project. So I did. I wrote from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. On many days, it seemed like I wasn’t accomplishing much, producing only a couple hundred words, if that. On other days the writing flowed a little better and I might produce 1,000 words or more. But after 10 months of holding myself rigorously to that schedule, I had a 300-page manuscript, which I spent another four or five months revising.
Repurpose. A concept that all professional writers understand is that of repurposing, or reusing, things you’ve already written. That is especially important when you’re writing incrementally. Blog posts can be expanded into columns and columns into articles. Articles can become book chapters, and vice versa. A scholarly piece, revised and condensed, can make an excellent general-interest column for the local newspaper.
The point is to increase your output without unnecessarily duplicating your effort. Writers who publish a lot are constantly looking for such opportunities. In fact, I learned about repurposing from my dad, a professional writer and photographer for four decades. To promote his first book of photographs, back in the early 1990s, he wrote three versions of essentially the same article for three different national magazines.
So contrary to what you may have thought, you really do have time to write—you’ve just been using that time for other things. But if you’re willing to rearrange your work and personal life, make some sacrifices, and be patient, you can become a published and perhaps prolific author, even while teaching five courses a semester.
Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College and author of Building a Career in America's Community Colleges. He writes monthly for our community-college column and blogs for Vitae. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his employer. You can follow Rob on Twitter @HigherEdSpeak.

January 12, 2015

STUDENT SYMPOSIUM 2015 REGISTRATION NOW OPEN! Deadline is Monday, February 2, 2015

STUDENT SYMPOSIUM 2015 REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!

DEADLINE:  Monday, February 2, 2015

STUDENT SYMPOSIUM 2015 REGISTRATION

STUDENT SYMPOSIUM 2015 GUIDELINES (.PDF)

 Please read the guidelines before registering!
 Frequently Asked Questions

The Student Symposium at Ball State University offers students an opportunity to showcase their research projects and creative endeavors in an exciting afternoon poster session and moderated paper presentations taking place throughout the afternoon. Poster presentations may be a poster, creative or multimedia display, or other exhibit.

All Ball State University students are eligible: undergraduate, graduate, those from Burris Laboratory School, and the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities. Student must have have engaged in academic activities either inside or outside the classroom, and must have been advised by a Ball State faculty mentor.  Students from all disciplines are invited to participate in this event.

The Student Symposium at Ball State University social media outlets: 


Twitter: https://twitter.com/BSU_SPO ‐‐ Hashtag #ssbsu15 

Registration Dates


Monday, January 12 - Monday, February 2, 2015

Event Date & Location


Tuesday, March 31, 2015

L.A. Pittenger Student Center, 2nd floor

Schedule of Events


Display Setup:

Monday, March 30          2:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, March 31         6:00 – 8:00 a.m.

             Judging:                         8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.   

Only judges may be present at this time.

 Public Sessions:               1:00 – 4:30 p.m.

  Presentation of Awards:   4:30 – 5:00 p.m. 

Prize winners will be announced at 4:30p.m. in Cardinal Hall.   Participants must be present to win.

Contact Information:  Ms. Jessie Roark 


Many of the documents on our website require Adobe Reader:
Download it free here

Aspire Internal Grant Program Spring Semester Deadlines!

 
SPRING SEMESTER DEADLINES! Are you in need of Research or Creative Arts funding for your projects? Are you traveling to present at a conference or professional meeting? Look no further than the Aspire Internal Grant Program:

BSU's ASPiRE Internal Grant Program supports student-initiated research, creative arts projects, and scholarly studies. Graduate Students may submit proposals for up to $500, Undergraduate Students $300, for Research or Creative Arts project costs such as travel or supplies. All students presenting papers, posters, etc., at conferences or professional meetings can request $100 to defray travel costs.

AY 14-15 Aspire Student Program Spring deadlines:

Graduate Student Competitions:
. Research applications due: January 15, 2015
. Creative Arts applications due: January 29, 2015
. Hollis Program applications due: April 1, 2015

Undergraduate Student Competitions:
. Research applications due: February 5, 2015
. Creative Arts applications due: February 12, 2015

Student Travel Grants: Applications due 15th of each month prior to travel date (for presentations of papers and/or posters, etc., at meetings or conferences)

For Program Guidelines, see:http://cms.bsu.edu/about/administrativeoffices/spo/aspire/studentprograms. Questions pertaining to the ASPiRE Program can be directed to aspire@bsu.edu or by calling the Sponsored Programs Office at 765-285-1600

January 09, 2015

Cohen Peace Fellow Grants Proposal Deadline Extended (consult w/ SPO by 2/1/15, submit to SPO by 5PM 2/15/15)

We have extended the opportunity to submit proposals for the Benjamin V. Cohen Peace Fellowship. Ball State faculty members AND graduate students are eligible to apply.

The Fellowship provides support to conduct basic or applied research on topics related to peace. Note that projects that focus on aspects of structural violence, direct violence, and/or social justice are permissible. Also note if you are planning to conduct a project, for example, on any of the topics listed below, you must clearly and concretely connect this focus with the mission of the Cohen Fund. That is, how will your project expand knowledge and/or solve practical problems associated with issues affecting world peace to improve the human condition?

Final Call for the 18th annual Student History Conference! (deadline: 5PM Wed 1/14/15)

Final Call for 18th annual Student History Conference submissions!

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY 5 PM ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2015

Please submit your entries for Ball State University's annual Student History Conference soon. The conference will be held on Friday, February 20. MA students usually submit either a 12-page paper from one of their graduate courses here, or a paper written as an undergraduate. Undergraduates may submit a 10-page paper as well.  This is an excellent chance to develop your presentation skills and to expand your CV. Also, remember that we offer cash prizes for the best papers.  Dr. Sviatoslav Dmitriev at dmitriev@bsu.edu.  The Call for Papers is included with this message

2015 SHC Call for Papers (.docx)

BeneFacta Day 2014 President Ferguson Speech

President Paul W. Ferguson's remarks at the 2014 Research Week BeneFacta Day gala organized by the Ball State University Sponsored Programs Office.


BeneFacta Day
4-6pm, November 19th, 2014
Alumni Center, Assembly Hall
Ball State University

Research Week 2014:
http://cms.bsu.edu/about/administrati...

BeneFacta Presentation (.pptx)
http://goo.gl/ymHk02

January 06, 2015

Save the Date! 20th Annual Student Symposium at Ball State University

Save the Date!

20th Annual Student Symposium at Ball State University
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
L.A. Pittenger Student Center, 2nd floor

For twenty years the Student Symposium at Ball State University has provided students with the opportunity to showcase creative and scholarly projects while gaining practical experience presenting their work in a conference setting right here on Ball State’s campus. The Student Symposium encourages interdisciplinary discourse, allowing students to learn from each other about engaging topics from many disciplines around the university. The Student Symposium is open to the public, allowing student participants the opportunity to share their work with a wider audience. The Student Symposium accepts both poster and paper presentation entries and is open to any student from Ball State University (undergraduate and graduate), Burris Laboratory School, and the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities. Poster presentations are eligible for one of six cash prizes and all paper presentations will receive feedback from a faculty moderator.

Guidelines available Friday, January 9th, 2015.
Registration opens on Monday, January 12th, 2015 and ends Monday, February 2, 2015.