For more than 15 years, graduate student research has been paying off.
The Charles E. Shanklin Award for Research Excellence, sponsored by Graduate Student Senate (GSS), annually rewards six graduate students during a May graduate awards ceremony. The focus this year for GSS is to dispel any myths about the nature of the Shanklin awards.
“We really want to get the word out this year that wherever you have put in some time, then go ahead and submit,” Brigitte Wex, GSS honors and awards coordinator, said. “Sometimes there’s this misconception that the Charles E. Shanklin means competing with biology even though they submit a paper in english, and that’s just not the case.”
According to Wex, submissions are placed in one of three categories and only judged in comparison with other papers in that category.
“Research is not only the hard sciences,” Wex said. “Research in the Shanklin awards can really be in the form of a paper you did for a class or a project in any major.”
Though the award aims to require little extra work on the part of the student, research must be a part of submissions.
“One of the snags that arose for some people is that they wrote interesting papers, but they weren’t research based,” Maureen Wilson, assistant professor in college student personnel and judge for last year’s competition, said. “As I understand the requirements, it’s a research competition, not a writing competition. I think people need to look at that real carefully as they are doing submissions.”
Founded by University alumni and Board of Trustees member Charles E. Shanklin, the award is a plus to any graduate student vita.
“It’s a really big honor in terms of looking at the broader picture of the whole community,” Wex said. “It’s a very prestigious award and a really big honor that you carry not only for yourself as a person, but for your department.”
Though other awards exist for graduate students including the Administrative/ Research Assistant Award and various departmental awards, the Shanklin is in a category of its own.
“You’re competing with a very diverse group,” Wex said. “Even if you’re just in one of the divisions, there are still so many graduate students you’re competing with in so many different majors. It’s really a different kind of evaluation of your paper.”
The difference lies in the oral presentation that all finalists must give to judges and audience members before the final decisions.
This requirement is really more of a learning opportunity, according to Wex.
“It gives students the opportunity to enter a competition which addresses a broad audience,” Wex said. “It’s really an opportunity students have to get some communication skills with a bigger audience.”
According to Sara Goldstein, graduate student in the department of psychology and Shanklin finalist the past two years, the oral presentation has value.
“I enjoyed my experience of appearing before the judges to personally present my work,” she said. “It was a good learning experience and also a good way to share my work with others who may not have read the paper that was submitted.” As it turns out, judges also learn from their participation in the Shanklin awards.
“Reading something outside of sociology was a nice change of pace,” Jeffrey Houser, assistant professor in the department of sociology and judge for last year’s competition, said. “Finding out what other departments specialize in was also very enlightening.” One of the built-in advantages of the award is that despite where any judge’s specialty lies, it proves to be fairly easy to weed out weaker papers.
“When I showed up at the meeting with the other two judges, I had flagged four papers that were really pretty strong and it was completely consistent with what the other two (judges) had done,” Wilson said. “We were from other areas and different backgrounds, and I think that that was confirming, in a good way, that good writing is good writing no matter the field.”
Houser agrees with his former judging partner.
“Sometimes form can over-ride content,” he said. “It was easy for me to sift through the papers using simply my understanding of the necessary components of a well structured argument.”
Challenging graduate students, awards like the Shanklin are here to stay.
“Anything that pushes students toward excellence is bound to be beneficial in their development as scholars,” Houser said. “Competitions like the Shanklin do just that.”
Editor’s Note: Application forms for the Shanklin Award are available in the GSS office located in room 402 of the Bowen-Thompson Student Union, or on the Web at www.bgsu.edu/studentlife/organizations/gss/home.htm The deadline for submission of papers is 2 p.m. Friday, Feb. 28.