Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Responsibilities
The following guidelines apply to all fellows who enter the program. The guidelines set out in this document are in keeping with the "program structure" as articulated by The Mellon Foundation its web page.
Each year there will be approximately eight mandatory monthly meetings of all fellows in the program.
These monthly meetings will be constituted as a seminar that will focus on each fellow’s development of a single research project during his or her tenure in the program. The end result of this process will be a twenty-five to thirty-five page scholarly paper in the fellow’s field (this format can be altered, where necessary, to fit the format of a particular field). In addition to helping to develop graduate-level research and writing skills, this process also gives the fellows an opportunity to produce a paper that can, in condensed form, be published in the MMUF journal.
In keeping, then, with the goal of a single research project, fellows will be expected in their first semester in the program to develop, in conjunction with their mentors, a detailed research proposal of approximately 10 double-spaced pages. This proposal can differ entirely from the three-page proposal that accompanies their applications or it can be a development of that proposal; but whatever the case, unless there are special circumstances approved by a fellow’s mentor, each fellow will be expected to stick with his or her proposal after it is developed in the first semester of his or her tenure in the program.
For the ensuing three semesters and the summer between the junior and senior year, each fellow will be expected to develop the ideas in the proposal as follows: In the second semester, each fellow will be expected to develop an annotated bibliography of 15-20 titles. The summer and the first semester of the senior year, then, will be spent writing a first draft of the paper (or developing the particular project, if it is not in a paper format; it might, for example, be presented in audio or video format). And the final semester of the senior year will be spent writing the final draft or finishing the project in its alternative form.
In accordance with this agenda, the eight monthly meetings, which will last 2-3 hours, will be spent in peer review of the projects. For a fellow to receive his or her funding, for the work over the two the mentor must sign off at each stage. A student studying abroad will be expected to stay on this research schedule, though, clearly, he or she cannot attend the monthly meetings. In general, we require fellows to be in residence at Cornell for their first semester in the program before they undertake any study abroad; and such study should normally not extend beyond one semester. In addition to the eight monthly meetings, all first-year fellows will receive instruction in research methods in coordination with Olin Library.
In conjunction with this schedule, each fellow in the program is expected to complete a theory requirement, preferably in the first year of the program. To meet this requirement, each fellow, during his or her junior year, will apply to the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers, held every summer at Andover Academy in Massachusetts. The Institute provides a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum in theory as well as workshops that prepare students for graduate school. Applications are competitive, so we expect any of our fellows who are admitted to the program to attend, and Mellon funding will be provided. As an alternative to IRT, fellows can also apply to the Mellon summer program at the University of Chicago, where places are awarded on a first-come-first-served basis. For fellows who cannot attend either of these programs there are alternative ways to fulfill the theory requirement through course work at Cornell. This course work which must be approved by the fellow’s mentor and the faculty coordinator of the program. Reasons for not attending must be approved by the faculty coordinator.
During the two years of the program, each fellow will be expected to attend at least two regional Mellon conferences and present their research at one of these conferences. If a fellow enters as a senior, the expectation will be attendance at one conference at which the fellow will present his or her work.
