The Office of the Dean of the College offers one of the most important sources of thesis funding. Unlike specialized sources of funding, the ODOC general fund is unrestricted with regard to research topic or department. There are two deadlines to apply for ODOC funding: Juniors may apply in late March for summer projects, and seniors may apply in early October for travel during fall break, winter break or Intersession. Students applying for winter break or Intersession funding are notified by mid-November, with plenty of time to plan their trips, but those who wish to travel during fall break face a compressed schedule.
ODOC encourages those planning fall break trips to ensure the thoroughness of their applications, promising to prioritize the review of those applications. But following this compressed schedule, students often do not find out whether funding has been awarded until one or two weeks before they are set to travel. Furthermore, since the funding is not distributed until after the break, students must pay for travel arrangements out of their own pockets in anticipation of reimbursement.
Given these difficulties, ODOC should consider creating an application round specifically for fall break research trips. Given that ODOC already expedites applications of those who apply for fall break funding, this change would simply institutionalize what is already a two-tiered system. Such a system would create more transparency, and if decisions were released three to four weeks before fall break, when airline flights are typically cheaper, the University would save money and help relax a stressful and risky process.
As an added benefit to having separate deadlines, ODOC could slightly push back the application round for winter break and Intersession. This would help many seniors who, unaware of their research needs in early October, might have a better understanding of their projects slightly later in the fall semester. Especially given that many seniors do not find thesis advisers — much less have well-defined research topic — until the early fall, it makes sense that funding deadlines for winter break and Intersession should be slightly later.
One concern with this differentiated funding scheme is that ODOC might not know how much money to allocate in each round. A simple, if imperfect, solution to this problem would be to maintain the same ratio of dollars applied for to dollars awarded in each round. If anything, students would be incentivized to begin thinking about their research earlier, most likely over the summer, to prepare a strong application for fall break funding. Such early thinking is already incentivized for those who wish to do summer research, but it is unrealistic to expect that students wishing to get head starts on their thesis research should start in the spring of junior year.
It is understandable that seniors may want to spend fall break conducting research instead of waiting until winter break or, especially, Intersession, which is only two months before theses are due. But under the current application scheme, securing funding for fall break is difficult and uncertain. ODOC and other funding sources should strongly consider formalizing what is already a two-tiered review process.
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