2009-2010 ORCA Final Report Guidelines

This page contains information for all 2009-2010 ORCA grant recipients. If you received a grant this year, you must submit a final report as part of the agreement you made with ORCA by accepting the funding. The final report is an important part of the award. Your final report, along with others from this year’s recipients, will be published in the online ORCA Journal of Undergraduate Research.

Please read the following guidelines, then click here to submit your final report.

2009-2010 Deadlines

April 2010 graduates: June 30, 2010
All others: December 31, 2010

Detailed instructions for authors

Content

Write your final report so that readers who are not specialists in the subject can appreciate the purpose of the study and understand the procedures and conclusions. The entire paper must be no more than two pages single-spaced (including graphics, tables, charts, references, and appendices). If your ORCA project resulted in a honors thesis or other lengthy publication, your final report should merely summarize and highlight the paper; do not send us your entire manuscript.

The purpose of the final report is to publish the results of your research, or depending on your discipline, chronicle your experiences, successes, and failures. We want to know how you approached your proposed work: did it turn out the way you hypothesized? What problems arose that you have solved or had to adapt to? What areas need further research or development? Any or all of these points could be included in your final report. Please keep in mind, that even if you have not completed your research, we still want a report from you. Tell us how close you are to completing the research and what you accomplished so far. What results do you expect to see?

If your project results in a publishable paper, conference presentation, or other work, please indicate in the report where it was published, displayed or disseminated. Your report will be accessible to the general public and should not include any information that is proprietary or confidential.

Graphics

You are welcome to include graphics in your final report, but you must format them within your report before submitting to ORCA. Our office will not insert and format graphics into reports. Please compress an graphics.

References

Use the citation type (i.e. MLA, APA, etc.) familiar to your discipline. If uncertain, use numeric footnotes to denote in-text citations and collect references at the end of the paper, before the figures; include a final footnote and corresponding reference the end of the body text that acknowledges sponsorship or the help of colleagues.

Formatting

Click here to download an ORCA final report template. This Word template has all the formatting you will need; simply replace the text in the template with your own. If you prefer to create a new document, you must adhere to the following criteria:

Font: 12-point, Times Roman or comparable
Margins: 1 inch all sides
Length: Do not exceed 2 pages, single space
Indentation: None
Heading: At the top of your report, include your first and last name, the title of your project, your faculty mentor’s first and last name, and your mentor’s department.

Files

Please submit your report as a Word document, PDF, or other text file. Files cannot exceed 1 megabyte.

ORCA

ORCA - Final Report Guidelines