Nova PhDs

joe, take a look at www.ncur.org -- that will answer a lot of your questions. undergrad research is very much the trend in many higher ed circles right now -- "engagement" is the buzzword -- so it's a good thing for you to do as well as them. from what i can tell, they tend to end up accepting about 40-50ish abstracts from undergraduates doing research in philosophy every year, and about 30 end up actually going and presenting their work there. students have 15 minutes to present their work, and 5 minutes to field questions.

it's an *enormous* (i can't stress this enough) conference -- hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand students in all different disciplines attend. anyway, it's a great thing to do if you have students who have done really excellent research papers and are willing to take the time to submit an abstract for it -- only the abstract actually goes in for review, and they choose based on those.

my impression, based on the number of my own students submitting papers and actually accepted there, is that they have something like a 50% acceptance rate, so i think it's definitely worth spending some extra time prepping students for something that they might end up putting on their resume and never taking off. for my advanced classes and honors tutorials, i build in the requirement for an abstract to be turned in with their final paper, so that i can get them to submit these...