March 3 - Abstracts

With the abstract submission deadline for the Roanoke College Conference for Student Research and Creativity (RCCSRC) approaching quickly, discussing and developing abstracts was an appropriate topic for today.  Abstracts were defined as a brief advertisement for a paper, that succinctly describes the importance of the topic, defines the hypothesis and data set, and provides a summary of the results (if generated.) 

Most conferences, including RCCSRC, require an abstract submission for a paper to be considered for presentation.  It is my hope that all students will submit their paper for presentation at least once before the end of the semester, making a strong abstract crucial.

I brought several academic journals with me so that students could see several examples of effective and successful abstracts.  Students then went to work on drafting an abstract for their paper.

While most students worked on their abstracts, I reviewed dynamic models with Tyler and Nic.  Tyler and Nic are expanding their papers from my econometrics course last semester.  The dominant expansion is the employment of more sophisticated time series models, including a model with a lagged dependent variable.  Within a few minutes we had lagged error terms and violations of the ZCM assumption all over the chalk board.  Great fun!

When the brief econometrics lesson was over, Nic and Tyler worked on incorporating the new modeling into their abstracts, and I worked with Sara on finalizing her survey questions.  Once Sara incorporates some fixes, she will be ready to take the online NIH course, get her certificate, and submit her application to the IRB.  Once we have IRB approval, she can send her survey out to the student body via email. 

I then read over Justin and Sara's abstracts that they pieced together during class and made some suggestions.  They had done a fantastic job. 

We also had some announcements for the group:
1) Nic Wright is going to graduate school!  He received his first acceptance letter for a PhD program in   Economics.
2) Brent Cox is also into two graduate programs for health policy.
3) Tyler Rinko is all over the RC web page, blog, and daily announcement for his acceptance for presentation at the NCUR later this month.

All in all, today was a fantastic day of work, with so many things going on.  Productivity was running high and students are doing well.