Today is the deadline for the second-annual GAPSA-Provost's Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation.
The two-year-old award, a summer fellowship jointly sponsored by the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and the Office of the University Provost, consists of a $2,000 monthly summer stipend for graduate and professional students who are pursuing interdisciplinary research.
Like last year, six students will win $6,000 to pursue research over three summer months.
"It's a way of encouraging interdisciplinary education at the graduate level, which is actually kind of unusual in that graduate education is normally specifically targeted," said GAPSA Chairman and fourth-year Annenberg School for Communication graduate student Lee Shaker.
Students who receive the fellowship will be required to present their research at a reception in the fall.
Shaker said the award is designed to adhere to the Penn Compact's goals to champion interdisciplinary study.
"These grants reinforce a number of Penn's most cherished values," Provost Ron Daniels said in a press release. "They support graduate students in significant summer research, and they promote an integration of knowledge across disciplines. Both are vital to the future of academic scholarship."
According to fourth-year School of Medicine student and chairwoman of the selection committee Wenny Lin, GAPSA contributed $18,000 toward the award, and the Provost matched that, giving the group a total of $36,000 to distribute.
The money "is supposed to be for the student to either pay for the cost of doing their work, or at least to sustain themselves throughout the summer," Lin said, comparing the award to a summer stipend.
Last year, GAPSA received about 70 applications, and the group - the umbrella student-government organization for graduate and professional students - is hoping for a similar number this year.
Winners will be chosen by a selection committee, composed of both faculty and student representatives of all 12 graduate schools at Penn.
"Something I wanted to emphasize for this year is that we like more team efforts," Lin added. "One of the goals of GAPSA is to have inter-school collaboration between students. I would like to see more of that."
Last year's winners had only positive things to say about their research experiences.
"The kind of stuff that I'm working on is to try to come up with new optical techniques," said seventh-year School of Arts and Sciences graduate student Jonathan Fisher, who has been doing this research for the past five years. The award's funding covered the last stages of it, in which he uses "lights and lasers to image electric activity in neurons in the brain."
Fisher said the money he received went toward things like transportation costs and buying raw metal for machine parts.
Amy Bach, a sixth-year student in the Graduate School of Education, also received the fellowship last year.
"My research is an ethnography of a youth-media organization," Bach said. "So I'm looking at literacy as something different than sort of school-based notions of what counts as literacy."
"I think this is a good opportunity to bridge disciplines, something that isn't often done," she said.
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