For Performances or Exhibits

Provide a brief description of the work to be performed or exhibited in the form of a program note. Please make sure that your faculty mentor looks over your description before it is submitted.

Program Note Example:

Title: Variations and Transformations

Summary:
Variations have frequently been written by instrumentalists as vehicles for their own virtuosity. The works features on this program however were all written by important composers who were not themselves cellists, but each with a particular performer in mind. The results are works of substance, yet rich with cellistic personality. These composers also reveal some affinity or homage in their choice of theme or model, yet they develop and transform the borrowed material in their own special language. I find this interplay of "old" and "new" especially fascinating in our age of "historical awareness".

(by Brent Wissick; used with permission)

For Posters and Platform Talks

For research-based presentations you should prepare an abstract. Abstracts are brief, but comprehensive summaries of work presented as a talk or poster and should contain the following elements:

1. purpose of the study
2. hypothesis
3. experimental approach
4. summary of the results
5. conclusion and implications

Talk it out first:

Before writing your abstract you may find it helpful to describe your work to a friend who is unfamiliar with what you’ve done. Listen to yourself as you speak and write down what you say. This may help you determine which details are essential to include in your abstract.

Tips for writing a good abstract:

• Use an outline of your presentation as the framework of your abstract.
• Don’t include information that will not appear your presentation.
• Define all abbreviations, acronyms, and unique terms.
• Be brief. Remember, you’re limited to 300 words.
• Use past tense to describe methods performed and present tense to describe purpose of the study, the results and the conclusion.
• Please make sure that your faculty mentor looks over your abstract before it is submitted.

Abstract Example:

Title: Approaches Toward the Identification of Sex-Specific DNA in Ratites

Abstract:
The sex chromosomes in humans and other mammals are designated X and Y. In avian species the sex chromosomes are designated Z and W with males being the homogametic sex (ZZ) and females the heterogametic sex (ZW). In Gallinaceous birds such as quail and chicken, the sex chromosomes are dimorphic but in ratites, such as the ostrich, they are indistinguishable in a karyotype. Repetitive elements unique to the W chromosomes have been found in Gallinaceous birds and have been used successfully for sex determination. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify a W chromosome-specific DNA segment in ostrich.

Enrichment of sex-specific sequences was approached using the phenol emulsion reassociation technique (PERT). A small amount of female DNA was denatured and allowed to rehybridize for six days in the presence of excess danatured male DNA using a phenol emulsion. A sub-sample was ligated into pBluescript IISK+, and E. coli were transformed with the ligation products. Transformed bacteria were screened for inserts and candidate clones were screened for sex specificity by Southern hybridization using total male or total female DNA as a probe. Individual inserts were also labeled and used to screen genomic DNA on dot blots. None of the inserts screened showed any sex specificity. A sex-specific DNA sequence in ratites remains to be identified.