SouthEastern Undergraduate Sociology Symposium

 

REGISTRATION AND GUIDELINES

Registration Application coming soon.

Check back Monday, November 16, 2009

Guidelines:  Your presentation should be between 12-15 minutes in length. Please keep in mind that the audience may not be familiar with your paper topic, therefore try to minimize the use of technical terms and briefly describe the theories/statistical techniques you employ. Also, it is suggested that you do not read your paper verbatim.  Instead work from an outline or script. Practice your presentation in advance -paying special attention to the 15 minute time limit - as it will be strictly enforced.

Seen below is one common model for organizing presentations that you could use:

1. Introduce your paper by stating your research question(s) clearly.
2. Explain to the audience why providing an answer to this question is important (e.g., does your research have implications for policy makers, for society as large?).
3. Briefly describe the answers that other researchers have provided to your research question (i.e., briefly review the literature on your research question).
4. Explain how you went about answering your research question (e.g., library research, analyzing data others have collected, collecting your own data). Briefly note any strengths and weaknesses of your approach.
5. If your paper involves the analysis of data, briefly describe the methods used to analyze such data.
6. Describe your major findings. (Feel free to prepare handouts for distribution to the audience - prepare about 30 copies).
7. Conclude by describing the contribution your paper makes to the literature and/or larger community.

There will be a faculty or graduate student discussant in each paper session, and this person will briefly comment on the papers at the end of the session. Audience members will then have a few minutes to address questions to the presenters.