Final Paper

Final Paper Guidelines

Audience

Your final paper for RSI should be accessible and attractive to an intelligent person who is not an expert in your field. If you're a mathematician, imagine writing for a biologist. If you're a biologist, imagine writing for a mathematician.

Length

Your paper should be 10-15 pages long. This count does not include figures, tables, bibliography, or appendices.

Deadlines

The last paper draft is due Saturday, July 28. OpenOffice papers are due at 9 am. LaTeX papers are due at 11 am. Print four copies of your draft. Give three to your tutor and keep the others for buddy reading.

The last paper draft is due Saturday, July 28 . OpenOffice papers are due at 9 am . LaTeX papers are due at 11 am. Print four copies of your draft. Give three to your tutor and keep the others for buddy reading. The final paper is due Monday, July 30 . OpenOffice papers are due at 9 am. LaTeX papers are due at 5 pm. These deadlines are not flexible. Tutors, TAs, and nobodies have many papers to read and very little time to read them. In order to give you the best feedback possible as quickly as possible, we must have your papers on time. Earlier drafts are encouraged.

Bibliography

Citation guidelines are at web.mit.edu/rsi/www/pdfs/citations.pdf and the official bibliography format is at web.mit.edu/rsi/www/pdfs/bib-format.pdf. There is only one change for this year, which is that your bibliography need not be alphabetized, but should be ordered based on when you refer to each source in your paper. This is the system that LaTeX implements automatically.

Buddy Reading

After you have submitted your drafts on Saturday, you will split into small groups to read each other's papers and give feedback. The tutors will assign the groups. You will receive further details about this later in the week.

Advice

You can find several excellent sources of paper advice, including sample papers from previous years, on at web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2007/advice. More sample papers will be posted soon. Of course, you may always discuss your paper with your tutor, TAs, or nobodies. Your tutor can also refer you to other people in your field who can read drafts of your paper.

Technical Help

Check the RSI website at web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2007/tech. If the answer to your question isn't there, try Google, then zephyr rsi-help.

Milestones

The Second Milestone

Instructions

The second milestone is due by bedcheck on Friday, July 20. You should edit your introduction and add material relevant to the work that you've done. For example, describe your materials and methods, present some data the you've gathered, or set forth the conjectures and theorems that you've come up with.

This draft should be as long as it needs to be. For some of you, this will be 5 or 6 pages. Others will find that your work adds up to 10 or 12 pages. In general, longer is better here, as it's usually easier to edit and cut material than it is to produce new material. Turn the paper in to your tutor. If you cannot find him or her, slide it underneath the door of their room in Simmons.

Roughly, this paper will include

• an updated instruction,
• the tools that you are using (methods, programs, famous theorems)
• results or partial results (data, theorems)

If possible, you can start to include some preliminary analysis, though this will most likely have to wait for your final paper.

There is no presentation for the second milestone. However, if you would like to give a practice presentation, just arrange a time with your tutor.

Note: These milestones are a minimum standard that we'd like you to meet. If you wish to exceed those standards you are perfectly welcome to do so. If you wish to turn in early drafts for your tutor to edit so that you may turn in a higher quality draft on Friday, just track him or her down and hand in a copy of the draft.

The First Milestone

Instructions

By the end of the first week you will have read the background material about your research topic, problem, or field, and perhaps begun gathering data or setting up your experimental apparatus. For the first milestone, you are to present an introduction to the field you are working in and the work you are doing.  The object is to give an introduction to your personal research with enough detail to satisfy a scientifically sophisticated nonexpert.

This paper will form the basis of the introduction section of your final paper.

The Paper

You should write a 2–4 page introduction to your work. Present your topic and a summary of the previous work in the field. Include a complete bibliography of all works you have read or are reading related to your work, even if you do not currently see how they might apply to what you will be doing. You should pay special attention to work your mentor is doing in your field of study.

You should write your paper in LaTeX or OpenOffice and submit it as a hard copy to your tutor before Saturday's bedcheck. There is no electronic submission process for this milestone.

The paper template is contained in your Paper directory. The sections that you are not using should be kept as they are. You should

• Create a cover page in cover.tex.
• Leave the abstract as it is in abstract.tex.
• Fill in the introduction Section of paper.tex.
• Do not delete the later sections of paper.tex.
• Fill in the Acknowledgements Section of paper.tex.
• List your references and background reading in biblio.tex.
• Leave the appendix as it is in appa.tex.

Here are documents describing the bibliography format and citation guidelines.

The Talk

Explain your work to your fellow Rickoids in under five minutes. Present relevant background in sufficient detail to allow your peers to understand what work you are doing without overwhelming them with details.

You must email a PDF file containing your slides to your tutor before bedcheck on Friday evening. Electronic slides submitted after midnight on Friday might not be available for your presentation.

You should not expect to have more than five slides for your talk to fill five minutes.

The talks will be given Saturday morning, July 7, beginning at 10AM in building 1: 1-134 (John), 1-135 (Jenny), 1-150 (Alli, Kyra), 1-242 (Zach).