The syllabus contains the basic description of what is expected of the term project/paper, but what follows are several other guidelines and resources.
The term project contributes 30% to the final grade, and that is broken down as follows:
- 10: Paper (original work) goes beyond what was presented in class; contains no major math or logic errors; results presented clearly
- 5: Paper: (background) conveys motivation for studying this topic; shows evidence of wider reading than just the textbooks
- 5: Paper: (format) adequate length; proper grammar and spelling; consistent formats for citations, figures, equations
- 10: Presentation: clarity; clarity; clarity!
THE PAPER:
- This component is due on Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Please email the document to me (preferrably in PDF, but MSWord or other formats are okay). If you can, please also turn in a paper version in class, but that's not required; it's just for my own ease of grading.
- Each journal has its own "author instructions" for preparing papers. The one for the Astrophysical Journal is close to being a community standard for astronomers; find it HERE. The AIP also has a good online Author Resource Center HERE.
- Solar physicist Rob Rutten has put together some useful notes and templates for using LaTeX for scientific writing.
- Astonomer Lynn Hillenbrand recently taught a course titled Writing in Astronomy, whose web page contains many links to helpful resources (scroll down in the above link).
- EXAMPLE TERM PAPERS:
- With some hesitation, I give you a link to my own 22 year old term paper from a solar physics course I took at the University of Delaware. (Apologies for the low-res scan, but no fully electronic version exists - the figures were hand-pasted into place!) Please don't use this as too literal a guide, however. For one thing, in that class the paper was only supposed to be a literature survey, so it's not exactly analogous to the one in this course.
- On the opposite extreme (i.e., a computation-heavy paper with nearly no literature survey) is this short paper on polytropic models. It is actually a professor's solution to an assigned problem set, but nonetheless it is of the right order of magnitude in length and "depth" as the computational work appropriate for a project like this.
- Of course, googling "How to write an astronomy paper" will bring up lots of useful hints and tips, also....
THE PRESENTATION:
- In the last week of classes, I anticipate setting aside 2 sessions for in-class presentations. For the 6 registered students, that's roughly 15-17 minutes per presentation. Aim for 10 minutes of primary "talking time" and save the rest for questions and informal back-and-forth. Feel free to divide up the time how you like, but roughly speaking, if half of your talking time is devoted to background and motivation for your topic, and half is devoted to presenting your own work, you're probably in good shape.
- The goal is something in between a short talk at the AAS and an informal "whiteboard session" (i.e., what you've been warned about for Comps II). The syllabus says no Powerpoint, but if you really need to project graphical results or images, it's fine to use. I'm glad that our classroom has whiteboard space to the left of the projector screen, so we can go back and forth between the two easily.
- For those of you not used to giving scientific talks, I have assembled some of the best advice from around the community.