BYU Mentoring Grants for Undergraduates

General information

ORCA grants reimburse students for their time, supplies, and/or other expenses involved with conducting an academic project. The grants provide opportunity to work with professors outside of the classroom and promote mentored learning that can enrich students’ undergraduate experience.

Students may either design their own project or work on a professor’s ongoing research, but all ORCA students must work with a faculty mentor. Some students approach faculty with their own ideas, while others receive ORCA grants for work they are already doing as a research or teaching assistant. Students should initiate the mentoring relationship by asking a faculty member to advise them on a project. It is advisable to take a class or two from the professor, if possible.

The student must write their own proposal, though the faculty mentor should review and advise during its preparation. Once the award is granted, the student should meet regularly with the mentor to go over the progress of the project and receive advice and help.

Eligibility

• must currently be enrolled as a fulltime undergraduate student
• must have at least two semesters before graduating; this includes the semester during which you apply for the grant. Students graduating in April 2010 are eligible to apply. December 2009 graduates are not eligible.
• must be in Good academic standing
• must find a faculty member who is willing to serve as a mentor.

Sophomores and Juniors are especially encouraged to apply.

Proposal guidelines

Proposals may not exceed two pages, or approximately 1,000 words. The document must be either Microsoft Word or PDF format and cannot exceed 2 MB. You may include charts, graphs, pictures, etc. if desired.

The following information must be included in the head of the document:

• Proposal Title
• Applicant’s name
• Applicant’s email
• Applicant’s RouteY NetID
• Mentor’s name and department

The following information should be included in the body of the document:

• Goal/Purpose: write a succinct statement summarizing the goal of the project
• Importance of project: explain why this project is important. It may, for example, fill a research need, attempt to provide a practical solution to a vexing problem, or create an aesthetic work of art.
• Main Proposal body: This section is the main body of your proposal. Include your research plans; methods and expectations for this project based on the unique skills you and your mentor possess to conduct this project. If you need to include images or symbols with your proposal, please be sure to optimize the images so the entire document is not more than 2 MB.
• Anticipated Academic outcome: describe any presentations, displays, publications, or other tangible outcomes you anticipate. This may be a paper, a formal presentation, a performance, an invention, or even a lecture in a public forum such as a class presentation.
• Qualifications: explain why you or your mentor is qualified to pursue this project
• Project timetable: summarize the major milestones in your project
• Scholarly Sources: cite up to 6 scholarly sources demonstrating that you have conducted preliminary research to prepare for your project. Use serious, scholarly articles from respected sources. Make sure that you use the appropriate citation style for your discipline.
• Fitting with the mission of BYU (optional): All projects must have a strong academic focus appropriate for the discipline. However, many projects address issues of unique interest to BYU or the Church. Strengthening families, applying revealed knowledge to secular problems, promoting morality in law and society, creating uplifting art and literature, and inventing items that will solve world problems are examples that fit with the mission of BYU. You may enter "Not applicable" in the box and no points will be taken away for not answering this question, although additional points can be given for good fits with the mission of BYU.

Click here for examples of successful proposals from ORCA recipients.

Click here for a proposal template.

Group Submissions

Proposals may be submitted individually or as a group of two or more when each member is working on one project.

When submitting as a group, one person must be established as the principal investigator (project leader) and others as co-investigators. A student may be listed as an applicant on only one proposal each school year.

If each individual in a group is responsible for a separate part of the same project, ORCA recommends that each person applies separately. If group members apply together, the $1,500 is divided. If each individual does a separate part of the same project, ORCA recommends that each member submit a separate application because this may allow each group member to receive their own $1,500.

Travel

Any student traveling to a foreign country is expected to register their travel plan on the BYU Student International Travel Registry , maintained by the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. This must be done before financial awards are received. All international travel in conjunction with BYU mentoring grants must be booked and paid for through the BYU Travel Office. Travel to and research in countries on the U.S. State Department's Travel Warning List must have prior approval from BYU's International Vice President's office.

Human subjects

IRB Tutorial (required). The Institutional Review Board is a federally mandated committee to ensure that the rights and health of human subjects are maintained and that ethical procedures are always followed. If your proposal is awarded and requires IRB approval, you will be required to attend a workshop on submitting an application to the IRB. A separate IRB application must be submitted after attending the workshop and before proceeding with the project or receiving the check for the award.

Awarding and Judging Criteria

Proposals are reviewed by a panel of professors and specialists from the applicant’s college or department. Applications are sorted by discipline and ranked within their college, not compared to students in other fields. Judges award points based on the following criteria:

• Is the proposal well-developed and articulated?
• Do the stated hypotheses and/or creative focus have merit, or in other words, are they valid, significant questions or focus and will the work be a contribution to the student’s discipline of area of study?
• Is the methodology appropriate to the hypothesis and/or creative focus?
• What is the applicant’s potential for accomplishing the proposed project or expectation that the applicant is capable of successfully completing it? How strong does the mentoring relationship appear to be?

Terms & requirements

All ORCA recipients are required to:

• Write a thank-you letter to their donor
• meet with their mentor frequently
• complete their proposed project in a timely manner
• submit a two-page final report to ORCA upon completion of the project. Final reports for April graduates are due in June, 2010. All other final reports for 2009-2010 ORCA recipients will be due December 31, 2010. Awardees who do not submit a satisfactory final report may be required to pay back the grant and may disqualify their mentor from mentoring future students.

2009 - 2010 Deadlines

• ORCA Grant Applications open for students

• ORCA student deadline. Proposals must be submitted online before midnight. You will receive a confirmation email.

• ORCA mentor endorsement deadline. Faculty mentor endorsements are due by midnight; ORCA cannot process student applications without a mentor endorsement

• Deadline for ORCA reviews done by colleges

• ORCA winners announced. All applicants will be notified whether or not they are awarded. Check your email in early February to find out whether or not you will receive a grant.

• ORCA checks available.