Guidelines for Abstracts

How to Write an Abstract for Student Symposium

An abstract is a short summary of your work that should be accessible to a general audience. Please keep your abstract to around 300 words.

What to include:

No matter your discipline, your abstract will include four main points. We recommend meeting with your faculty sponsor to discuss these four points, as well as how you might best describe your research/project in a short amount of space.

Questions in parenthesis are intended to serve as a starting point - you do not need to answer all of these questions in your abstract. 

• Objective (What are you trying to figure out? Why should we care?)
• Approach (How did you do it? What was your process like? What was your medium?)
• Results (What did you find?)
• Conclusion (Implications? Future research?)

When you are satisfied with your abstract, please submit it to the student symposium committee through the symposium website.

Sample student symposium abstracts are below, for your reference.

Sample 1:

Despite growing concern over the harmful effects of America’s cigarette and alcohol consumption, efforts to reduce these behaviors have largely failed. A review of current research regarding adolescent alcohol and cigarette use and family structure was conducted. The current research states a higher likelihood of substance use in adolescents in non-traditional family structures. It is hypothesized in this study that non-traditional family structure will not have an effect on alcohol and/or cigarette use among adolescents but that there will be an association between the types of interactions between adolescents and their parent/s and alcohol and/or cigarette use. The study analyzed data from the Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth Study conducted in 20XX.  There was a significance found between familial fighting and if the adolescent had siblings or not and cigarette use. Overall, the study did not support the current research on the topic and found no significance between non-traditional family structure and adolescent alcohol and cigarette use. These findings are noteworthy and may provide a starting point for further research.  

Sample 2:

Film adaptations should be judged on the basis of how well they uphold the “original” piece. Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, an adaptation of several of Raymond Carver’s texts, is no exception. Numerous critics have debated whether the film is truly worthy of Carver’s legacy. The film’s soundscape is among the elements contested. Critics concerned with fidelity are quick to assert Altman’s sound deviations as failures, claiming the film is not recognizable as an echo of Carver’s texts, while critics more concerned with the film’s effectiveness than its fidelity to Carver’s texts argue that changes are necessary when shifting media. Avoiding value judgments of the film in the context of Carver’s texts, this presentation explores how sound in Altman and Carver differ and how we, as readers and listeners, experience both. Despite the fact that the film’s soundscape is different from Carver’s, Altman’s transmutation of sound continues to illustrate a central theme in Carver’s texts: the characters’ entrapments and futile attempts to escape their lives.

Sample 3:

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is second only to Alzheimer’s disease as the most common neurodegenerative disease in humans, and individuals with PD are at a higher risk of developing melanoma. African Americans have a lower incidence of PD and present with symptoms at an older age than Caucasians, suggesting a relationship between skin pigmentation and PD. In addition, highly pigmented individuals may be making more of the precursor to dopamine, L-dopa, that is used to treat PD, explaining the delayed onset of PD. A zebrafish model was used to investigate the hypothesis that rescuing melanocytes in a zebrafish mutant without pigmentation and with a movement disorder would result in an increase in endogenous production of L-dopa and restore movement. One-cell embryo mutants were injected with a plasmid containing a melanocyte-specific promoter (microphthalmia-associated transcription factor, mitf) which controls production of melanin within melanocytes and a gene lacking in the mutants that is involved in movement (transient receptor potential cation channel 7, trpm7), thereby potentially restoring both the pigmentation and movement in the mutant fish. Embryos (48 hours postfertilization) were observed for rescue of melanocytes and a movement assay was conducted. Embryos were genotyped to confirm presence of mitf plasmid. Partial rescue of melanocytes was seen in trpm7/ mitf generation-zero zebrafish. No significant movement difference was seen in trpm7/mitf transgenic animals in comparison to trpm 7 -/- mutants. 

Sample 4:

When you have a diverse community that is still fractured, what do you do? What do you need? Community and connection. Our Stories was an attempt to take a world that was so strongly divided and bring together a group of people to connect and share. To talk about themselves and to listen to each other.

The beauty of Cornell is the block plan; for one month we study one thing really closely. We live in that class, that world. And then we are done, and just as quickly as it started, it’s over and a new class becomes our lives. We disconnect completely from friends we may have made in one class and connect or reconnect to new ones. As an artist and as a guiding collaborator, I wanted to challenge this set-up, and use the extended rehearsal process I am familiar with in the world of theatre to encourage a community of people to come together. For three months (September 2017-November 2017), this group of ensemble members would write whenever they had time, and would come together to share, and then spend whatever time we had left doing something to build bonds or share a common knowledge. Through the process of free-writing, drafting, and narrative experimentation, 15 ensemble members generated stories to share in a showcase. In September 2017, 15 people from a variety of backgrounds and departments of study walked into the audition room alone. In November, they walked out of the Van Etten-Lacey House as a community, validated and supported in the fact that they had stories to tell and people to share them with.

This presentation will present the project, along with the process that we went through, and how as the director/guiding collaborator, I used a combination of theatre games and discussion of social justice to create a safe space for exploration, discussion, and expression, where people who were unfamiliar with each other were more comfortable sharing things they normally would not feel encouraged to--stories about marginalization, about depression, about small triumphs, and about growing older. Kate Gielas, one of the ensemble members, will present the piece she wrote for the showcase, titled “Fiery Determination.”