Call for Student  Oral Presentation and Poster Abstracts

Tribal College Forum VIII 
Northwest Indian College

Bellingham, Washington
August 18 - 29, 2009

Call Open: May 16, 2009 – July 20, 2009

 

 

We invite Tribal College and University student submission of abstracts for contributed oral and poster presentations at Tribal College Forum VIII. The meeting will be held August 18 – 20, 2009, at Northwest Indian College(NWIC) in Bellingham, Washington. Abstracts that address the Forum theme, Sacred Lands, Sacred Trust: Geospatial and Spiritual Perspectives, are especially encouraged.  Please adhere to the following guidelines in preparing and submitting your abstract.

Please note that student submissions will be reviewed for relevancy to the conference theme and a limited number will be accepted for travel awards to attend and present at the Forum.

  

A. One Presentation Rule

·         To encourage broad participation, each TCU student is allowed to present only one oral or poster presentation.

 

B. Guidelines for All Oral Presentations

·         Student speakers for oral presentations are allowed 15 minutes for presentations.

·         A 5 minute period between talks allows for questions, discussion, and introduction of the next speaker. This 5 minute period belongs to the audience, not to the speaker, and is managed by the session presider. Time limits will be strictly enforced by session presiders.

 

Important Information Concerning All Oral Presentations:

·         Microsoft PowerPoint is  the only acceptable audiovisual format for electronic presentation for oral papers. Overhead or slide projectors will be available ONLY upon special request by July 20, 2009 to Mike Collins.

·         Each meeting room will be equipped with a dedicated LCD projector and PC laptop configured with DVD/CDRW combo roms, 3 USB ports and will be running Windows XP Pro with MS Office XP Suite. It is your responsibility to make sure that your presentation will run under this system. Newer versions of PowerPoint files may not work – save your files in a format compatible with MS Office 2000 for Windows 2000!

·         Corel presentations are NOT supported. Embedded animation or graphics are NOT supported. MAC format is NOT supported.

·         Please do NOT bring your own laptop for your presentation. If you created your presentation on a MAC and confirmed that your presentation does NOT work in one of the speaker-ready rooms available at the Annual Meeting, you may connect your MAC to the LCD projector IF you bring your own VGA dongle. ESA will not provide these adapters.

·         All student presenters will be expected to contact their session presider or projectionist at least 20 minutes in advance of the start of their session to pre-load their presentations onto the dedicated laptop.

·         Acceptable media: CDs, Flash drives. You will need to ensure that these are compatible with our laptops – which will have CD readers and USB 2 ports.  

 

C. Guidelines for all Poster Presentations

·         Posters are encouraged as they allow extended informal discussions and active participation by authors and coauthors. Posters are displayed for a full day, and interested persons can view the poster even when the author is not in attendance.

·         Lunchtime and afternoon poster sessions Wednesday – Thursday, August 19th and 20th,  provide an opportunity for discussion in a relaxed setting. Presenting authors are required to be present for their respective scheduled 1 hour period when their poster is being displayed.

·         Poster boards are approximately 2.4 m wide x 1.2 m tall (8 ft wide x 4 feet tall) and there will be 1 poster per poster board.  A poster does not have to take up the maximum amount of space provided.  Since these dimensions are not precise, presenters should design posters to be at least 5 cm (2 inches) smaller on each margin.  Pushpins will be supplied, and are the only method for attaching the poster to the board.

·         Student poster presenters may not use audio-visual equipment but are welcome to bring along handouts associated with their presentation.  

 

D. Evaluation and Acceptance of Abstracts

·         Accuracy of the abstract is the responsibility of the author(s). Abstracts will be rejected if they do not comply precisely with the guidelines on content and format listed here and on the submission website.

·         Abstracts must be based primarily on NEW, unpublished material. Reviews of past work are generally not permissible.

·         Abstracts may be submitted before all analyses and conclusions are in their final form, but authors MUST report at least preliminary results. Abstracts based primarily on future work will be REJECTED. Vague statements such as “results will be discussed” will result in abstract rejection.

·         Abstracts must use standard English, and follow English syntax, grammar, and punctuation rules. Poorly written abstracts will be REJECTED.  

 

E. Abstract Submission

Use the Word Abstract submission form provided, and attach it to an e-mail addressed to collins.emichael@gmail.com.

 

Submitting Abstract and Author Information:

Follow the instructions provide here and on the Abstract submission form to submit your abstract.  Follow these general guidelines when entering your abstract:

·         Abstracts may be no longer than 400 words in total and must include information on both a) Background/Questions/Methods, using up to 200 words and b)Results/Conclusions, using up to 200 words. We encourage each contributor to identify the objective of the study in the first of these, and be explicit about the results of the study in the second of these. Abstracts without explicitly stated results will not be accepted.

·         Exception: If you are presenting a non-traditional research paper, it is still expected that your talk would address some question. It is understandable that these abstracts would lack specific data in the “Results/Conclusions” section; however, every talk should have a “take-home message”.

·         When entering your title, capitalize the first word, proper nouns, and the first word following a colon. The title is limited to 255 characters (about 15 words). Do not type the title in all capital letters. Place a comma before the word "and" in a series. Do not end your title with punctuation.        

Example: Fecal glucorticoids: A non-invasive method for measuring stress in river otters, brown bears, and red deer

·         For each author, enter the full first name, the first letter of the middle name, and the full last name.  Do not add punctuation after any of the names. 

·         Only the first line of text in an author’s affiliation will appear in the official conference program; this should be the name of your institution.  Do NOT enter department name on the first line of an author’s affiliation.  Do not end a line with any type of punctuation.

·         Symbols, special characters, and fonts are available from a pull-down menu of codes on the abstract submission form. Enter them by selecting from this menu.

·         Notification of Receipt: If you encounter problems during abstract submission, contact  collins.emichael@gmail.com.

·          

Note: Due to the limited amount of time and space available for oral sessions, and the anticipated number of submissions, you may be asked to give a poster presentation instead of an oral presentation.

 

 

G. Cancellations

·         Before submitting an abstract, authors should be confident that they will attend the meeting and make the presentation.

·         If cancellation is unavoidable, the author should notify Mike Collins as soon as possible. 

·         The deadline for cancellation without penalty is July 31, 2009.  

 

H. Penalties for Cancellations/No-Shows

Late cancellations and failures to give scheduled presentations are disruptive and leave costly gaps in the program that are distracting to all attendees. Therefore, TCF Planning Committee has adopted the following cancellation policy:

·         Presenters who cancel after July 31, 2009 will not be allowed to give a presentation at the 2010 TCF IX.

·         Presenters who fail to appear for a scheduled presentation and who do not give any prior notice to the TCF Planning Committee, will not be allowed to give a presentation at the 2010 and 2011 TCFs.

·         Exceptions: Cancellation penalties may be waived if special circumstances apply. Consideration will be case by case by contacting Mike Collins.  

 

I. Begin Submission Process

To begin the submission process, please use the Word formatted Abstract submission form provided.

   

For further information consult the TCF VIII meeting web site or contact Mike Collins.