Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Funding Your Dissertation



The Office of Student Fellowships and Grants will be hosting a series of Academic Success and Professional Development Workshops. This Thursday, November 8, 2012 in Marvin Center Room 403, 4:00-5:00 pm the Professional Development Series will be hosting an information session on "Funding Your Dissertation Research." PhD candidates will learn about specific competitive programs that can provide funds for doctoral dissertation research, funding strategies, and tips for successful proposals. Interested PhD candidates can RSVP to gradfell@gwu.edu. 

This information session will provide helpful information for funding your research at different stages. Although our department gives us funding for tuition, there are other great opportunities for funding, both pre-ABD and dissertation research. The talk will cover the variety of types of funding available to PhD students. Below are the highlights from last year's talk. Make sure you stop by the OGSAF office to pick up informational handouts - they have helpful lists with funding requirements and deadlines. 

I.                   Types of Funding
a.       Tuition (i.e. Phi Delta Gamma, Scottish Rite, D.A.R., Liebmann)
b.      Basic Necessities (like photocopying, travel, equipment): i.e. Cosmos, Economic Club, Consortium, Research Fellows Program.
c.       Overseas Research (i.e. Fulbright, Boren) and Language Acquisition (i.e. CLS)

II.                Tips
a.       Look for funding at least one year in advance of when you need it.
b.      Make sure you read the elligability requirements very carefully. Some funding is only for students at a certain stage in their program.
c.       Read the literature supplied by the institution. What is the mission of the agency?
d.      Make sure you have all the necessary documents for each submission
e.       Give Faculty plenty of time for letters of recommendation, and send helpful reminders
f.       Many funding deadlines are in early fall or early spring
g.      Ask people in your department for other funding opportunities

III.             Examples of Support
a.       Travels to Collections (i.e. Loughran-Oxford, Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grants)
b.      Pre-Dissertation (i.e. SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship)
c.       Dissertation Writing (i.e. Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program, GW Dissertation Fellowship)
d.      Dissertation Research (i.e. NPSC Dissertation Support Program, Jack Kent Cooke Dissertation Fellowship Award, White House Historical Association Research Grants Program)

IV.            Finding Funding (Note: All of these must be accessed on-campus or through the GW VPN because they are subscriber-only access)
b.      The Illinois Research Information Service (IRIS)
c.       Community of Science Funding Opportunities Database (COS) (Note: This database is for all disciplines, not just science)

V.               Help from OGSAF
a.       They will read drafts of your proposal
b.      Make copies of your application and proposal (as well as scan items)
c.       Consult on specific fellowship questions
d.      Publish your accomplishment on their website



Thursday, October 25, 2012

EGSA Meeting Minutes 10/15



EGSA Meeting Minutes 10/15 
o   Book Sale Success- Thanks to all who contributed their time and energy to our recent book sale. We sold four boxes of books in six hours!

o   Mentors: Thanks for participating in the EGSA Mentoring program this semester. The Board would like to kindly remind you to check in with your mentees and invite them to upcoming EGSA events!

o   EGSA is officially reregistered for the new calendar year, but we await word on whether our budget is approved. All active members of the English Graduate Program may apply for programming funds through the EGSA Board. See Kadie Groh for more information

o   The EGSA Symposium 2013 CFP has been posted to our blog and Facebook page. The deadline for panel ideas is October 26. See Molly Lewis with any questions or to submit panel proposals.

o   Thank you to all who turned out for our Plan Your PhD event on October 19, and thank you to the organizers and speakers for making it a successful event! You will be able to find all of the handouts from the event on our blog or email Maia Gil’Adi for more information.

o   Mark your Calendars for the Plan Your M.A. event on November 2, 3:00-5:00pm in Rome 771. See William Quiterio and Maia Gil’Adi for more information.

o   Thank you to all of you who showed up for the October Happy Hour at 51st State – it was great catching up with you all.

o   Mark your calendars for the November Happy Hour on November 29 following Tony Lopez’s Book Launch event. Location is TBA. See Shyama Rajendran for more information.

o   For the first time EGSA will be organizing a Library of Congress Graduate Research Orientation on November 5 from 6:30-8pm at the Library of Congress. To RSVP for this event, email Tawnya Ravy.

o   The next EGSA meeting will be November 28 5-6pm in the student lounge. EGSA Meeting are open to all members of the community.

We value your suggestions, ideas, and concerns. Email us at gwegsa@gmail.com and Check out our Blog (gwuegsa.blogspot.com) and Facebook page to follow EGSA throughout the month! 

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Plan Your PhD - Resources & Documents

Thank you to all who could join us for our annual "Plan Your PhD" event! We had wonderful and experienced speakers who gave us reviews, tips, and resources for each of the steps of the PhD process. Below you will find links to the documents provided during the event. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.

The Plan Your PhD Handout provides an overview of the requirements provided by the English Student Handbook (requirements, exam summaries, etc.) as well as resources and tools for professionalizing yourself.

The Field Exam and Dissertation handouts provide great strategies and things to look forward to for each of these steps. If you have questions about this or any of the other exams/parts of the PhD (qualifying exam, language exam, or prospectus defense) please feel free to ask.

The following three articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education provide great advice from both professors and students about being part of a PhD program: What I Tell My Graduate Students, Graduate School as Means to a Job, As Smart as I'll Ever Be.

We are also attaching a list of Resources for Americanists (national conferences, publications, blogs, twitter feeds, etc.) and will soon post one for the other two concentrations in the department.

See you at the next event!



Friday, October 5, 2012

Symposium CFP 2013 Officially Here!

We are very excited to announce the third annual GW EGSA symposium entitled Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities that will take place on February 15, 2013. We look forward to seeing the wonderful submissions you all send in!

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EGSA Symposium 2013 CFP

Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities 

  
A Palimpsest of Street Posters in Puducherry, India

In his book Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that “[w]e need to
consider why we find anachronism productive.” And in this symposium on slippages
and slidings of time, place, space, and identity, we hope to explore just that. Despite our discipline’s best efforts to encode certain texts to specific temporalities and geographies, graduate students of GWU English recognize that figures and objects are not static relics of time, and any attempt to keep them as such will only result in failure. By embracing that Halberstamian failure, though, as a site of productivity, we hope to explore the possibilities that lie within those literary, historical, artistic anachronisms that remain dynamically in flux.

Thus, the GWU EGSA board is excited to announce our third annual symposium entitled Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities. We invite panels and papers that explore subject matter on race, space, nationality, identity, queerness, translation, transitional figures, ghosts, and all manner of things that cannot and will not remain still. Further, what do these failures tell us about space, place, identity, and time, and in what ways do they tell us? In this symposium, we hope to foster conversation between presenters and participants across concentrations and even disciplines through the intersections of current graduate student work to explore Chakrabarty’s suggestions as a question: what productivity will we find in exploring anachronism?

Panel Submission Guidelines
The GWU EGSA board will first be accepting panel submissions for our symposium, then individual panel organizers will be accepting paper abstracts. Panel submissions should be sent, along with your contact information, to Molly Lewis at mclewis@gwu.edu by 11:59 on October 26. Submissions must be 250 words or less and must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document or PDF.  Please include the words “EGSA Panel Submissions” in the subject line of your e-mail. Information on how to submit abstracts will be soon to follow.