Submission Information

Objectives:

• Recognize outstanding students for their best work
• Provide students with an outlet for their research and an addition to their résumés or graduate school applications
• Compile examples of high-quality student work.  In addition to several reference copies kept at the Rice Library, the journal’s contents will be placed on the USI website.
• Give students an opportunity to work on a journal.  Students will handle all aspects of production and distribution.
• Create a valuable recruiting tool for future USI scholars.  In addition to promotion on the Liberal Arts website, Dr. Partridge, director of the Honors Program, plans to feature the journal on the Honors page and discuss it with potential students.

Requirements:

The journal is open to submissions from any liberal arts discipline; outstanding term and research papers that focus on original research make great candidates for submission, so feel free to take a project from last semester and revise it to meet the following criteria.

• Any research paper or paper that uses critical or analytical skills and past research will be considered. (In short, consider submitting your best final projects or papers from your upper-level liberal arts classes. Possible submissions might include varied translations of poetry in global languages, papers describing psychology or sociology experiments, or traditional essays analyzing literature, history, or philosophy.)
• The submission should reveal an original thinker and an original contribution.
• Creative work such as fiction or poetry will not be considered.  (Another publication, The Aerie,is a great venue for that kind of work.)

Submission Details:

• Submissions are due by January 18, 2008, at 5:00 p.m. They may be submitted as a hard copy (to the mailbox of Dr. Michael Kearns on the third floor of the LA) or an electronic copy (emailed as a Word attachment to jawebb3@usieagles.org).
• The journal will be open to undergraduate submissions only.
• Submitters should still be enrolled or have graduated no later than December 2007.
• Submissions must be in manuscript form with the author’s name on the title page only, to facilitate blind judging. While manuscripts may be of any length, students should understand that their papers might need to be abridged to fit the journal’s requirements.
• The journal will use Modern Language Association (MLA) style by default or will allow specific essays to retain the style that best conveys their content (e.g. a psychology paper in the American Psychological Association (APA) style).
• The journal will be a 5.5" x 8.5" booklet printed by USI’s Print Services.

Faculty Advisors and Staff:

• Faculty Advisors: Dr. Ginette Aley (History), Dr. Christopher Bloom (Psychology), and Dr. Michael Kearns (English).
• Student Editors: Jon Webb and Leah Weinzapfel.
  (If you are interested in working with the staff of Amalgam in any capacity (editing, layout, promotion), contact Jon at jawebb3@usieagles.org.)