Major Events in the ACURA Year
ACURA Informational Meeting (September)
Early in the fall semester, prospective ACURA students and faculty research mentors meet at a luncheon to discuss the year’s upcoming ACURA program. Faculty mentors describe their research activities to the students, then informally discuss their project concepts with individual students as a means for students to find a research mentor and/or join a research team.
Poster Preparation Workshop (Winter)
All ACURA students and faculty are required to attend a poster preparation workshop that describes best practices for creating an effective poster for presentation at local and/or national conferences. This session includes instruction on how to use the Powerpoint poster template, creation of a research abstract, how to present effective graphs, data and results, and the writing of compelling yet concise text and concluding remarks.
ACURA Week! (April)
ACURA Week! celebrates and showcases the year’s research accomplishments and creative activities from the three academic divisions of Arts and Humanities, Science and Engineering.
At the Annual Poster Fair the student projects are displayed in poster format to the campus community. Students and faculty informally discuss the findings with the student researchers. Also, faculty judges circulate and interview the student researchers and determine the best student projects from each academic division that will later compete in the Fall Colloquium (see below). All faculty-student research teams are invited to the ACURA Banquet to listen to lectures by a key-note faculty speaker, as well as student researchers.
During the ACURA Goes to the Theatre event, our talented undergraduate thespians present a scene from the spring play and discuss with the audience their creative process in character development and their unique perspectives on themes from the play.
Other activities may include literary readings, art exhibitions, dance and musical presentations, and lectures by faculty speakers.
Fall Colloquium (October)
The student researchers who were selected by the poster fair judges as producing the best posters are invited to present their findings in a lecture format to the campus community. During the Colloquium the student researcher gives a fifteen minute lecture using Powerpoint and then answers questions of the audience. The winner of the Fall Colloquium lecture is awarded travel with their faculty mentor to present their findings at a national conference.
The winner of 2008 Fall Colloquium, representing the Division of Social Sciences, was Ms. Autumn Zellers presenting her work entitled, “How to Buy a T-Shirt in Marrakech: Cultural Anthropology in Morocco,” at the Society for Applied Anthropology in New Mexico, March 2009.
