Context

We have found that one of the most important predictors of success in this program is students' ability to make incremental progress towards their final paper each week. To ensure that students have a clear roadmap towards doing that, students and mentors are encouraged to decide on a "milestone submission" that is due in week 7.

The goal of the milestone is to provide some internal structure to the program and to ensure that if the milestone is met, the student is in a good place to turn in a first draft of the paper in week 9.

Sample milestones

Here is a sample of a milestone (they will differ from student to student, depending on the type of research and discipline the student does):

Student writing a survey-based paper (e.g. psychology)

• Week 7 milestone: Student to turn in (a) fully completed literature review section of the paper and (b) report preliminary results from the analysis of the data (e.g. average responses by gender/age categories for different questions)

Student writing a literature review paper (e.g. in biology)

• Week 7 milestone: Student to turn in two substantive sections of the paper (~2000 words)

Student writing a quantitative paper (e.g. in data science)

• Week 7 milestone: Student to turn in completed results from 2 predictive models

Note: We recommend that your milestone be some sort of written submission or output, so that students have something they can work with for the first draft. So even if the main goal for a week is to complete some sort of background reading, students are encouraged to write up a summary/relevant takeaways from the readings that they can then incorporate into their final paper.

Process for submission

Mentors can confirm the milestone that they have agreed on with their students through the Mentor Update form that they submit for week 5.