#statement of need

Who doesn’t like winning money?

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As a college instructor who likes to stay on top of my professional development, I attend conferences when my schedule permits. Over the last three years, I have been fortunate to win several scholarships valued at $2,000 for conference expenses such as registration, travel, food, and hotel accommodations. These scholarships were one of two types: those for which I received reimbursement for eligible expenses and those in which a conference sponsor paid the expenses.  Both types of scholarships involved an application process which required writing a statement of financial need. If you a college instructor who needs financial assistance to attend a conference, here are some tips to help you craft a letter that gets money!

First, answer the question, “Why do you need a scholarship?”

As one of the most important questions on a scholarship application, a response that is clear, informed, and compelling is essential. However, before you answer this question, take the following steps:

1.Compile an estimate of costs for registration, food (which may or may not be included with registration), and optional expenses such as workshops or field trips.  Using a best case scenario approach for your estimate, include the costs that feature money saving options such early bird or discounted registration for professional memberships as well as conference negotiated rates for nearby hotels.

2.Research travel options. Travel costs tend to be the most variable of conference costs but, with early and persistent searching, this cost can be manageable. Consider checking travel sites such as STA travel, which has a variety of discount travel options for teachers such as 15% off Amtrak and discounted airfare.

3. Determine if there are any financial resources from your department to support your attendance. Any support you can obtain can help you determine whether you need a partial or full scholarship. If department funding for attending conferences is limited or not available due to budget cuts, mention this situation in your statement of financial need (more about this shortly).

For either a partial for full scholarship, you may need to revise your estimate to adjust to scholarship amount offered. These adjustments may include finding less expensive travel or hotel accommodations, reducing your days of attendance, and/or eliminating optional expenses. To build a case for receiving a scholarship, see the section, “Writing a statement of financial need."

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Writing a statement of financial need

Whether requesting a partial or full scholarship, the objective of writing a statement of financial need is to convince the scholarship committee that you not only have an interest in attending but your attendance will promote conference sponsorship goals such disseminating new knowledge and ideas, providing professional development opportunities for attendees, or recruiting new members to a field. Be mindful that the scholarship committee wants to award scholarships to individuals for which there will be a good return on their investment. In other words, individuals who can show passion about an issue in the field, commitment to disciplinary endeavors, or enthusiasm about working with others will have a greater chance of being selected.

You can present yourself as an excellent candidate by covering as many of the following items as appropriate in your letter:

What do you bring to the conference? To begin your letter, briefly describe attributes such as your most recently earned degree and major, a synopsis of your research, professional accomplishments, years in the discipline or profession, and other related experiences. Think of your description as snapshot that could highlighted in the conference program materials for potential networking purposes.

Connect your professional activities to the theme of the conference

Conference organizers often a devise a theme as an attempt to unify disciplinary perspectives or provide a direction for future disciplinary endeavors. The conference scholarship committee will often select individuals whose passion, professional activities, or accomplishments most closely align with the theme.

Here is a scenario to use as an example:

A theme for a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) conference is “Advancing undergraduate STEM education for 21st century.”  You are an instructor who has been teaching undergraduate chemistry for six years. As you think about your professional activities, describe how you have been an advocate for using technological resources to help students understand chemical reactions. Mention that you were awarded a $2,000 grant to purchase a computer software tutorial and lab materials to help students learn about chemical reactions. As a result of using these resources, your students have demonstrated increased mastery of the subject as demonstrated by test scores which have improved by 30 percent over the last two years.

In a nutshell, this example shows that you are: 1) committed to excellence in teaching, 2) actively involved in advancing STEM education for undergraduates, and, 3) someone who has been awarded money in the past for STEM activities (always an attractive plus!)

Why do you want to attend this conference? 

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As you look through the program, select a few workshops, plenaries, or other forums of interest to you. Think of how you can express your interest in these events in a way that the scholarship committee would want to invest in you. For instance, consider what real world experiences you can bring to back to the classroom from attending the conference. Perhaps you can state that you will share the insights and perspectives of experts from a panel discussion about climate change with your environmental science students. Or, perhaps you can describe how you are looking forward to networking with other instructors to discuss scholarship resources to support students majoring in fine arts.

Offer to volunteer at the conference 

In some cases, serving as a volunteer is a condition for receiving scholarship assistance. In cases where it is not required, offering to volunteer may enhance your prospects of being selected to receive a scholarship. Volunteers are often needed for activities such as registration, distributing conference materials, escorting attendees with special needs to and from events, and moderating panel discussions. Offering to volunteer can also be a way that you express your gratitude for being selected to receive a scholarship. Whether required or offered, volunteering your time shows a willingness to be contribute toward a successful conference experience for everyone.

Bring these ingredients together for a winning scholarship letter!

As you incorporate these areas into your statement of need, do not forget to describe any special circumstances to emphasize your need for a scholarship. These may include limited or no departmental funding, possible childcare costs, or particularly expensive but necessary costs. For instance, I was successful in convincing a scholarship committee that traveling from Connecticut to attend a conference in California required airfare which would be a significant and potentially prohibitive cost for me. Lastly, make sure to close your statement of financial need by thanking the scholarship committee for their time and consideration of your request. If you have questions or you need assistance with your letter, visit my website, www.theesteemedscribe.com or feel free to contact me at [email protected].

I'M ABOUT TO DUMP A PRE-PROPOSAL. RIGHT NOW, ACTUALLY. I'LL SAVE YOU SOME TROUBLE AND PUT IT UNDER A BREAK. BUT THERE IT IS. IT WILL BE EDITED IN THE FUTURE. BUT THIS IS WHAT I'M DOING.

THESIS STUFF YEAH

Statement of Need

Literary hybrids are novels that incorporate multimedia elements, such as images, and more recently,music and simple animations, into their narrative in place of or in addition to descriptive text (Gunnars, 2005; Baio, 2011). The images in literary hybrids are referred to as “imagetext” and are used in many different ways by authors to achieve different goals (Carter, 2007). Most commonly, imagetext is used to generate anxiety and evoke certain emotional responses in a work (Maynard, 2003). Imagetext can allow a work to be read multiple ways, and opens the door for multiple interpretations on the plot of a work. Literary hybrids that use imagetext as a central part of their narrative are becoming more common and accessible thanks to innovations in available technologies making them easier to produce (Gunnars, 2005; Stroupe, 2000).

Literary hybrids are most commonly found in print, but when they are presented in an online format they can use animated and auditory elements in a similar manner to the imagetext found in print hybrid novels (Carter, 2007; Baio, 2011). These multimedia elements work together alongside written words to drive complex plots and stories which allow for multiple interpretations of a particular piece (Maynard, 2003). Due to the increasing popularity and commonality of such literary hybrid novels, it is important to understand how these multimedia elements are used by an author to tell a story and how they influence a work's plot (Gunnars, 2005).

Main Goal of Project

The main goal of this project is to understand how a literary hybrid's multimedia elements (such as images, animations, and auditory elements) influence its plot and story. The increasing numbers of literary hybrid novels make it important to understand how the non-text element of a work effect its overall plot. This is especially significant for the field of literature, as imagetext changes the way in which novels are read by adding an extra element for interpretation and generating an emotional response in the reader (Carter, 2007; Gunnars, 2005). If imagetext on its own can have such an effect on the narrative, one can also assume that other non-text elements can have a similar effect that must also be investigated.

A literary hybrid builds plots and stories using multiple mediums including text, imagery, animations and auditory elements in the form of music and sound effects. Because the plot of a single work is spread across these different mediums, it will be important to understand not only what plot itself is, but also how it can be represented in the individual elements of a literary hybrid. For example, if the author of a literary hybrid chooses to provide exposition for a story arc in the form of a short music piece and accompanying animation, in lieu of text, then it will be necessary to understand how the plot of that particular work is carried through the auditory and animated elements of that section. Understanding how imagetext itself is used, as well as the relationship between multimedia elements and the text will also be important in determining the influence these elements have on the plot of a literary hybrid novel.

Methods

For this project I plan to look at multiple literary hybrids and explore how the different multimedia elements are used to influence the plot of the literary hybrids containing them. For each literary hybrid, I will first determine what the basic plot is, and the types of multimedia elements the author chose to incorporate. I will then look at how the author uses the multimedia elements in place of text to convey pieces of the plot, and drive the overall story, as well as how the author uses multimedia elements to supplement existing text in their work. Literary hybrids used will be a mix of print novels that rely primarily on imagetext and online publications that incorporate more complex multimedia elements into their narrative.

Final Product

The final product will be a research paper of about 70 pages including an analysis of the plot of multiple literary hybrids. Each analysis will make up at least one chapter of the final paper, and will include a discussion on how the non-text elements used in the work influenced its overarching plot. It will also include an overall look at how multimedia elements are commonly used in literary hybrids, and will compare and contrast how influential multimedia elements are in print hybrid novels versus online hybrid novels. The final paper will also include a review of literature containing relevant background information, and a bibliography citing any sources used.

Problems

When dealing with online literary hybrids, there is always the possibility that the server they are hosted on could crash, resulting in data loss and loss of access to the novel itself. A solution to this would be to keep a hard copy of the literary hybrid on disc or a flash drive, but some of the multimedia elements in an online literary hybrid could take up a lot of disc space due to their file sized. In order to save a local copy of a digital literary hybrid one would require an external hard drive with sufficient disc space, estimated to be about 50 gigabytes. Such an external hard drive would give one access to an online literary hybrid in the event that the server it is hosted on suffers from any data loss or becomes otherwise inaccessible.