The Fellowship
It doesn't end when summer does
Here's what a Fellow actually does — from the first session to Poster Day, and everything that keeps going after.
Six weeks, start to finish
What a program looks like
Two 90-minute sessions a week for five weeks, then everyone gathers to present their ideas. Ten sessions, fifteen face-to-face contact hours with your professor, guidance for structured work outside of classs time, one research poster and presentation.
Week 1
Two sessions Getting oriented — the question, the field, the first steps
Week 2
Two sessions Building the foundation
Week 3
Two sessions Going deeper
Week 4
Two sessions Developing the project
Week 5
Two sessions Finalizing the research proposal and poster
Week 6
Poster Day Presenting real research to peers, families, and faculty
The capstone
What is Poster Day, and why it matters
A real academic output, not a certificate
At the end of each session, every Fellow presents a research poster summarizing the question they explored and what they found — the same format researchers use at academic conferences, scaled to a summer's worth of work.
It's judged by faculty from across the program, and a Poster Prize is awarded. It isn't a formality — it's the moment the summer's work becomes something a Fellow can point to and explain with real depth.
A wider room
Fellows meet faculty and students from across the entire program, not just their own cohort
Something to show for it
Every presentation is recorded — a Fellow can use it directly in university applications
Family included
Parents and friends are welcome to attend and watch a Fellow present their work
An example
What a finished poster looks like
Fellows propose original research — they design a study, not run and report one. Below is a stylized example of the kind of research proposal poster a Fellow presents at Poster Day. Click any section heading to see the skill-building behind it.
Research Proposal
Does Sleep Deprivation Change How Teenagers Interpret Ambiguous Facial Expressions?
↓ Click a heading below to see the work behind that section
Adolescence brings both chronic sleep restriction — over 70% of US teens fall short of the recommended 8–10 hours on school nights — and a documented negative bias in how ambiguous social cues get interpreted during this developmental window. Adult sleep-deprivation studies link poor sleep to amygdala hyperreactivity and a tendency to read neutral faces as threatening, but almost no work has tested whether this pattern holds, or is even stronger, during adolescence, when emotion-regulation circuitry is still maturing.
Behind the scenes
Fellows spend the first two weeks doing a structured literature search — learning to use PsycINFO and Google Scholar, reading primary research papers rather than summaries, and narrowing a broad interest down to one specific, testable gap in existing knowledge. They get explicit training in how to read a paper critically: spotting a weak sample, an overstated conclusion, or a confound the authors didn't address. That depth of knowledge isn't just background reading — it gets tested directly at Poster Day, when faculty ask questions a Fellow can only answer if they genuinely understand the literature, not just cited it.
Does one night of restricted sleep change how adolescents (14–17) rate the emotional valence of ambiguous facial expressions, compared to a well-rested baseline? Hypothesis: sleep-restricted participants will rate significantly more ambiguous faces as negative than well-rested participants, with the effect strongest for the most ambiguous (50/50 blended) expressions.
Behind the scenes
Turning a general curiosity into one precise, answerable question — and a hypothesis specific enough to actually be proven wrong — is one of the hardest skills in research. Fellows draft several versions before landing on one their faculty mentor confirms is testable.
A between-subjects design comparing a sleep-restricted group (max. 4 hours) to a well-rested control group (8+ hours), both wearing actigraphy watches overnight to verify compliance before completing a validated facial-emotion rating task the following morning.
Faces span a graded morph from clearly happy to clearly angry, so ambiguity can be measured in degrees rather than as a single category.
Behind the scenes
Designing a study means anticipating every confound before a single participant is recruited — why a between-subjects design here, why actigraphy instead of self-report, why 80 faces and not 20. Fellows learn to weigh multiple available measures against each other before choosing one, rather than defaulting to whatever's most familiar. They also think through the logistics of running a real study from the participant's (or, in other projects, the animal subject's) side — recruitment, consent, scheduling, and burden — and get an honest look at the finances behind research: what equipment, participant compensation, and staff time actually cost, and how that shapes what's realistic to propose. Alongside that, they pick up the basic statistical concepts needed to know, in plain terms, what would actually count as a meaningful result. Together, this gives Fellows a far more mature, accurate picture of how research really gets done — not just the tidy version that ends up in a published paper.
Hypothesized Pattern (Predicted — Not Actual Data)
Fig. 1 — Predicted % of ambiguous faces rated negative, by condition
If confirmed, this would be early evidence that ordinary, common sleep loss — not just clinical insomnia — measurably shifts how teenagers read other people's emotions, with real implications for how schools think about early start times.
Behind the scenes
Explaining why a finding would matter beyond the study itself is a skill in its own right — connecting a small, controlled experiment to a real-world stake someone outside academia would actually care about.
Limitations to address — single-night manipulation may not reflect chronic sleep debt; proposal includes a planned follow-up using a multi-night restriction protocol.
Selected references (11 of 24 reviewed) — van der Helm & Walker (2011); Beattie et al. (2015); Casement et al. (2019); Baum et al. (2014); Tomasi et al. (2020); Talbot et al. (2010); Yoo et al. (2007); Gruber & Cassoff (2014); Soffer-Dudek (2020); Palmer & Alfano (2017); Short & Chee (2019)
A sample proposal only — the real topic, question, and design are entirely the Fellow's own.
In their words
What Fellows have to say
Fellow reflections are on their way — check back soon.
After the summer
The Continuum
The program ends. The fellowship doesn't. Every Fellow gets ongoing access to The Continuum, which includes:
Live webinars
Sessions Fellows can join in real time on navigating university life and research — joining a lab, reading academic literature, building a research career.
On-demand library
A growing library of recorded content Fellows can work through at their own pace, whenever a topic becomes relevant to them.
Return to Poster Day
Alumni are always welcome to attend a future Poster Day, and can apply to present updated research themselves — with a fresh shot at the Poster Prize if selected.
The Continuum supports students as they make the transfer to college, ensuring they make the most of their university education.
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