Great Plains Honors Council 2010 Conference

 

The Great Plains Honors Council invites proposals from undergraduate Honors students, faculty, and administrators in the GPHC region.  Students are invited to submit proposals for posters or oral presentations on discipline-specific or Honors-related topics.  Honors faculty and administrators are invited to submit proposals on Honors program-related topics.  Proposals need not relate directly to the conference theme, which refers to the plenary sessions.  

 

Oral presentations for the GPHC conference should be about 15 minutes in length.  Each hour-long general session of student presentations will consist of three presentations, grouped thematically; thus, each presenter will have a few additional minutes to take questions from the audience.  Poster presentations are best suited to topics that can be represented or explained with visual illustration (see tips below).  Posters will be presented on the opening night of this year's conference.  To propose either an oral presentation or a poster presentation, you will need to submit an abstract, which is a summary of your topic.  For many students, presentation and poster topics are based on papers or projects that were done (or are being done) for a class--or on particularly effective or innovative projects undertaken by Honors student organizations.  At a GPHC conference, one can hear presentations on almost anything scholarly--from the life of French Romantic composer Cesar Franck to an exploration of mosquito abatement policies and techniques.  Tips for creating effective posters, writing good abstracts, and delivering compelling presentations can be found below.  

 

1) Complete this form. Please insert the short and long abstracts into the spaces provided on the form; the fields provided should expand as you type or paste text.  

2) Save the completed form.  Please do not change it from its .rtf format; we want to avoid having to retype each submission for the program book, so please--no pdfs.

3) Submit the completed proposal as an e-mail attachment sent to this address.  (If you have trouble with the e-mail link, please contact us.  Please do not submit the proposal by snail mail or fax--again, the retyping issue.)  These instructions do not apply to Boe Award submissions, which have an earlier deadline and different procedure (see below).

 

Students may enter full papers in a competition for a special award named for the late Dr. Dennis Boe, who was director of the Honors Program at East Central Oklahoma State University.  Boe Award submissions should be made directly by the Honors dean/director of the nominating institution. Each member institution may submit no more than two student papers for consideration.  For more information, instructions and criteria, click here.

 

The spring conference is a great place for students to learn the craft of presenting. The video below is offered as a model.  Mona Easterling of Tulsa Community College gave this talk on "Awareness of Emotions and Their Expression" at the 2009 conference held at the University of Nebraska.  This clip is best viewed with Windows Media Viewer. Mac users can get Flip4Mac, to see the clip on QuickTime, but may prefer VLC Media Player or Windows Media Player for Mac.
 

 

The National Collegiate Honors Council has published handouts offering guidance on writing abstracts, designing posters, and crafting successful presentations.