Master’s Project and Supervising Committee:
ENG 697 and Master’s Project:
Students may begin their Master’s Project at any time during the program. Students are strongly encouraged to base their Master’s Project on work submitted for a graduate course in the program. Students are encouraged to begin in their third semester.
Project Length:
Project is approximately thirty to forty pages of a quality suitable for submission to a refereed journal. Length and scope of project, however, is ultimately the responsibility of the student and his or her committee.
Project Format:
The only formatting requirement is that the first page or title page of the Master’s Project conforms to the title page style sheet which is available from the DGS and in the carousel in the office.
Supervising Committee:
At the beginning of their third semester, individual students shall assemble a committee of three faculty members. This committee is called the Student’s Supervising Committee.
- The first member of the committee shall be the chair of the committee and must be a member of the graduate faculty in the Department of English. The second and third members of the committee must be graduate faculty of UNC, and at least one must be a faculty member in the Department of English.
- Once the student assembles his or her committee, the student shall inform the DGS in writing or by email.
Oral Presentations:
Scheduling:
Oral Presentations must be scheduled with the DGS at least three weeks in advance of the presentation date. Students are responsible for scheduling their presentations when their committee members can attend.
In order to schedule an Oral Presentation, student must
- present project with completely signed cover sheet to DGS;
- place in the English Department office two copies of finished project;
- email an abstract of the project to the Graduate Student listserv (enggrad@listserv.unco.edu).
Copies placed in the department will be made available to graduate faculty and graduate students who wish to read the project before the oral presentation.
Please make note of the following:
- scheduling must precede the graduate school deadline for comprehensive exams by at least three weeks. However, given the number of presentations that are made, especially in the spring, students are strongly encouraged to arrange their presentations in February and October.
- student is responsible for writing an abstract to send to the Graduate Student listserv.
Guidelines:
Attendance at Oral Presentations will be limited to UNC faculty, English graduate students, and others by permission of the DGS.
One hour will be scheduled for oral presentation. The hour will be split into roughly three parts:
- One part will be twenty minute presentation of the project, basically an eight to nine page conference presentation based on the Master’s Project. This presentation should be written and reviewed by at least the chair of the student’s supervising committee.
- The second twenty minutes will be a presentation in which student makes theoretical and literary connections between his or her project and the discipline. Students are strongly encouraged to write out this part of the presentation, receive feedback from members of their committee, and read it aloud. Similar to the conference presentation, this portion should be eight or nine typed pages.
- The final twenty minutes will be a question and answer session with graduate faculty and students in attendance at the presentation.
With regard to Creative Master’s Projects, the same guidelines will apply, and students will locate their creative work within the literary and theoretical foundations of the discipline.
At the conclusion of the presentation, everyone except graduate faculty will be excused from the room. Graduate faculty will then discuss the presentation, and English graduate faculty present will receive a presentation scoring form with which to score the presentation. The scored rubric and any additional comments are due in the department mailbox of the DGS by five o’clock pm on the next work day. DGS will tabulate the results and inform the graduate faculty and the student of the results. Students who fail the oral presentation are permitted to make a second presentation, but must wait until the following semester to do so.
Rev. 10/05
