6) I prefer to send your letter myself rather than to give it to you to put in an application package. Please include addressed and STAMPED envelopes. For the UW’s Center for Career Services, a 9” x 12” campus mail envelope without postage is sufficient.
7) Paperclip all forms/waivers to the appropriate envelopes.
8) It is your responsibility to double-check with me that I have sent your letter on time. I will often notify you when the letter has been sent. If I have not done this by 1 week before your deadline, contact me by e-mail. I have not forgotten to send anyone’s letter yet, and if you remind me, I never will.
And good luck on your application.
Seminar homework assignment
Works well for undergraduates, from freshmen to seniors. Feel free to update and use it. Download the original .doc here.
452 Homework #1, Part C
Name:
Turn in this page and 3 attachments any time before Friday, March 14, 4pm. Worth 10 points.
Pick a colloquium or research seminar to attend in
any appropriately related science department
(e.g. chemistry, physiology and biophysics, genetics, zoology, biochemistry, physics…etc.) and go to it. Hints for places to find seminar notices are in the syllabus. You do not have to choose a seminar that I recommend or suggest. Find something that interests you.
Seminar Speaker:
Date/Time:
Department:
Title of Talk:
Give 5 brief sentences on what the speaker studies, in terms your classmates would understand:
What question would you ask the speaker about his or her research or field? Often the best questions in a seminar are the “simple” ones, asked by undergraduates or beginning grad students.
Did you ask this (or any) question during the seminar? If not, why not?
Use the Web of Science to find a list of the seminar speaker’s published articles. If you can’t find anything by this person (perhaps he/she is a graduate student), find a list for the person’s advisor. To save time and paper, print out and attach only one page of your Web of Science results. If you don’t know how to use the Web of Science, instructions are below, or go to the Chemistry Library and ask the librarians. They are very helpful. (I want you to use the Web of Science rather than Medline because Medline only covers a limited number of journals.)
If you are off campus or at a non-UW computer, click “off-campus access (log in)” and then log in.
Now from the UW libraries page you can click on “Research Databases”.
Click on Web of Science.
Unclick the Social Sciences and Arts Indexes at the bottom. Click on General Search at the top.
Under “Restrict Search” at the bottom, choose “English” “Article” rather than “All Document Types”.
Fill in the author’s last name (first), then the author’s first initial(s) (and the topic if you want) and hit “search.” Unless your author has an unusual name, your search may return articles that don’t belong to your particular author. Let’s use Mickey Schurr who studies DNA at UW as an example:
This search returns nothing. Try again.
This search returns a bunch of surgery papers. Try again.
The “star” = wildcard. Still surgery papers. Try again.
Lots of different Schurrs, but which one is Mickey?
DNA papers by “Schurr JM” at UW! M is not his first initial!
Aha! Perfect! All of these papers are good.
“Mark” a few papers that belong to your author by clicking the box to the left of the authors’ names. Gather all of your marked papers on one page by clicking the “submit” button under “mark” at the right, and then hit the “marked list” button at the very top.
Print the first page of the “marked records” page that is returned to you.
Choose one of the articles and print out its abstract from the Web of Science. You can view the abstract of a paper by clicking on its title.
Choose one of the publications from your list and photocopy or print the first page and attach it. Looking up the articles in the paper versions in the library is often more fun than looking online.
More detailed instructions for those who need it:
Note the journal, year, volume, issue and page number from the abstract you printed out. Some journals are online and you can print them out, and some are in the library on the shelves. Volumes available on the internet vary, but most will go back a few years. JACS (the journal of the American Chemical Society), and the Journal of Physical Chemistry go back much farther.
To find a journal online:
Go back to the UW libraries homepage. Click on “electronic journals”.
Search for your journal (sometimes it is easier to look under the letter, because the search is picky)
If your journal is available online, find your article, and print out the first page.
If the journal asks you to pay a subscription charge, then you are either not logged in properly, or UW cannot afford to subscribe to this journal online and you’ll have to look for it in the library stacks.
