Information for:

Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement/NKU Honors Program Fellowships

Encouraging Undergraduate Research

The Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement’s Honors Scholars is a program designed to underwrite and encourage undergraduate research that meets a community need. The program’s inaugural academic year will be the Fall 2010/Spring 2011 semesters. Up to seven fellows will be selected.

Applications are due by April 16, 2010. Download a copy of the application (pdf).

Selection will be made by April 30. They will be reviewed by an advisory committee jointly selected by the Director of the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement and the Director of the NKU Honors Program.  Then, the two directors will select up to seven fellows for the coming academic year.

Application to be a SH Fellow is open to any Honors Program student who will have completed at least 12 hours of Honors course work by the end of Spring semester 2010, who is in good standing with the NKU Honors Program, and still has Capstone work to be completed.  The application form must be completed and turned in to the Honors Program along with requisite materials by 5 p.m. April 16.

Each fellow will receive stipend of $2,500 and the student’s faculty mentor will receive a $500 ($250 per semester) faculty development stipend. The student stipend is intended for educational expenses, which are broadly defined (tuition, books, housing, educational travel, computer software). Distribution of student stipend will be incremental, and based upon regular progress reports on funded project.

Guiding ideas of this program

1. The goal is to partner undergraduates with supervising faculty to produce community-valued research, some of which could be identified by Vision 2015, but Vision 2015 needs are not the exclusive province of this award.
2. In exchange for a $2,500 fellowship, a fellow will be responsible for delivering high quality but “confined” research (i.e., something realistic and something that can be accomplished in the time frame of an academic year) as part of an Honors Program capstone credit-bearing class(es) monitored by a faculty member approved by the director of Honors Program. These research projects might also serve as the student’s Capstone project in Honors.
3. Research could be collaborative – that is, more than one student could work on one project if overseers (Honors, SHCCE, Vision 2015) deem a particular research project as conducive to collaboration.
4. Within budgetary constraints and at the discretion of the SHCCE director, the SHCCE will underwrite the cost of the fellows to attend a relevant conference during the academic year, such as the Kentucky Engagement Conference or the national NCUR (National Conference on Undergraduate Research). It is the goal of this provision to assure that each fellow has an opportunity to present his/her research at a minimum of one such conference. Other funding sources will be sought to help meet this goal.
5. All research projects are subject to the provisions of IRB Board review; some projects may not require that review.
6. Research will be the intellectual property of NKU – which can in turn assign its use to a community partner. Authorship, however, remains with the student who conducted the research, and the author should be credited in any substantive use of the research.
7. Each fellow will be responsible for making at least one public presentation on his/her research to a public P-12 school in northern Kentucky.
8. Each fellow will be responsible for making at least one public presentation on his/her research to a community group in northern Kentucky.
9. Each fellow must prepare an executive summary and a presentation-quality poster of his/her research to accompany the public presentations of the research.
10. The SHCCE will publish a synopsis of the research to showcase the research on campus and in the community.

Application Form (pdf)