In lieu of a final exam, there will be a project that will count for 25% of the final grade. This will enable you to explore a chosen topic in a bit more detail and gain some extra experience with scientific writing, scientific computing, and presenting your work in front of a group. The idea is for each student to identify a topic relevant to this course -- which also goes well beyond the material discussed in class -- write a review paper on that topic, and also present a conference-style poster on what you've learned. The general "rubric" is for the grade to be broken down as follows:
- 10%: Paper (scientific content and background): conveys motivation for studying this topic; goes beyond what was presented in class (i.e., shows evidence of wider reading than just the textbooks); material presented clearly.
- 3%: Paper (format): adequate length; proper grammar and spelling; consistent formats for citations, figures, equations; appropriate scholarly tone.
- 8%: Poster (content): clarity; clarity; clarity. Does it convey the material in an accessible way? Does it make sense when someone is viewing it without the benefit of the author being present to guide them through it?
- 4%: Poster (delivery): I hope to have time to go around to everyone's posters and hear their "spiel" (i.e., "elevator pitch"). Note that 50 minutes divided by 14 students = 3.5 minutes per poster.
If you're still finalizing your topics, please refer back to the list of ideas given in Homework 5, or feel free to chat with me at any time.
More About the Paper:
These kinds of review papers usually involve conveying the background (i.e., how did we come to understand the topic) and motivation (i.e., why is it relevant) to non-experts, as well as searching the literature to get a good sense of chronological progress. I'm also hoping that you will go a bit beyond this and demonstrate what you've learned by deriving a few equations, finding some relevant online data, and/or making a few plots.
It's up to you how you'll balance these different aspects, but I think the most interesting review papers do a little bit of "all of the above." For example, it's often possible to gain fresh new insights by remaking very old figures (i.e., if you're reviewing a paper from the era of hand-drawn plots) using modern tools and colormaps. However, it's still okay to go the route of "all literature review," but in that case your review should bring some new synthesis to the table; i.e., it shouldn't be just a re-hash of reviews that already exist.
The written component of the project should end up around 2500 words (i.e., very roughly 5 single-spaced pages or 10 double-spaced pages), not including the (required) bibliography. If you haven't worked much with LaTeX, this can be a good opportunity to get acquainted with it.
The paper is due on Monday, April 27, 2026, and unfortunately there's not much room for lateness after that, since I need to submit final grades before the end of finals week. There will be an assignment on Canvas that will allow you to upload a document (preferrably PDF, but other formats are okay).
Other resources for scientific writing include:
- Astonomer Lynn Hillenbrand teaches a course titled Writing in Astronomy, whose web page contains many links to helpful resources (scroll down in the above link).
- 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.
- Other possibly useful articles include The Science of Scientific Writing (Gopen & Swan 1990; American Scientist) and English Communication for Scientists (Doumont et al. 2014; Nature ebook) and The Art of Writing Science (Plaxco 2010; Protein Science).
- A brief and fun editorial on how to properly include equations in scientific text.
The Poster Presentation:
On the last day of class (Friday, April 24, 2026), we will hold a conference-style poster session, during which you will all present posters. The rest of the class (and any other members of the APS Department that we may invite to attend) will be encouraged to ask probing questions.
I am reasonably sure that we can fit 14 posters in Duane E126, but I think I'll need to limit you to traditional "AAS style" poster sizes: 3 feet (horizontal) by 4 feet (vertical). This room wouldn't work if we instead used "AGU style" sizes (same height, but 6 feet wide)!
The only poster printer I know about is on the 2nd floor of LASP's SPSC building on east campus, but I would wager that there's got to be at least one in Duane that APS people can use. (I'll try to check and update this page if I can.) Of course, there's nothing wrong with printing out your poster on individual 8.5x11 sheets and assembling them "in situ" (either directly on the walls of E126 or on a larger piece of cardboard or foamcore).
There are quite a few online resources for good poster presentations. See, for example,
- A short guide from NYU.
- Advice on both designing and delivering a poster from the American Physical Society.
- In recent years, a "less is more" approach (sometimes called "Poster 2.0") has been advocated in academia. See, for example, an NPR piece from 2019, or a study by Lewis et al. (2025).
If you have any questions about any aspect of the final project, please let me know.