Research Impact Award

Application Elements

The committee evaluating the applications recognizes that different fields of scholarly pursuit use different language and measure the significance of the work in different ways. We are using two versions of the application form: for creative inquiry projects and for research projects. The first question on the application form will ask you to choose the type of the project you will be doing. If you are not sure (or if your project has elements of both research and creative inquiry), please ask your faculty mentor or email ourci@towson.edu.

Research projects application

This version of the application form has the following prompts:

• Plain-language abstract of no more than 200 words that describes your project for those unfamiliar with your discipline. (This is a short summary of your application. Try to write it in a way that would interest the reader to find out more from the rest of the application.)
• Describe the significance of the project. (If your project benefits an academic field or serves the broader community, please describe the benefits here.)
• Specific goals and timeline. (This is an opportunity to explain what you plan to do for the project. It is entirely possible that things will not go according to plan. If such a possibility exists for your project, please briefly explain how you would adjust.)
• Description of your methods. (Please describe the research methods you will use in the project. This is also a good place to describe your prior experience. If you are in a very technical field, an additional description of your methods may be provided in the supporting document. Please try to keep your description to this prompt as non-technical as possible.)
• Describe how this project connects to your personal professional goals. (Please describe how this project fits with your professional goals.)
• Your Resume/CV. (Please show it to your faculty mentor first.)
• Supporting documents. (This is an optional field; you may choose to include a file with graphs or other images relevant to your proposal. The preferred format of the file is PDF.)

Creative inquiry projects application

This version of the application form has the following prompts:

• Plain-language proposal of no more than 200 words that describes your project for those unfamiliar with your discipline. (This is a short summary of your application. Try to write it in a way that would interest the reader to find out more from the rest of the application.)
• Describe the significance of the project. (Please define your audience and describe the motivation behind your project. Are you taking any creative risks in the project?)
• Describe how this project connects to your personal professional goals. (Please describe how this project fits with your professional goals.)
• Specific goals and timeline. (This is an opportunity to explain what you plan to do for the project. It is entirely possible that things will not go according to plan. If such a possibility exists for your project, please briefly explain how you would adjust.)
• Description of your methods. (What artistic tradition will you use as the starting point; describe what influences you. Think of this as a project-specific statement. This is a good place to describe your prior experience.)
• Describe how this project connects to your personal professional goals. (Please describe how this project fits with your professional goals.)
• Your Resume/CV. (Please show it to your faculty mentor first.)
• Supporting documents. (This is an optional field; you may choose to include a file with images or video relevant to your proposal. There is a size limit of 10MB on this file.)