The mentored research plan is an action plan. The objective of the plan is to identify your goals for the fellowship year, the logistics involved in meeting those goals, and producing the fellowship research, and the support and advice you will receive from your Fellowship Mentor, and others.
Guidance
The plan should be developed in collaboration with the fellowship mentor. What is most relevant in the plan will depend on the nature of the specific projects and the challenges to completing the components of the projects. You are encouraged to discuss your research and the plan with the Training Program Coordinator before you submit the plan.
Content
Discuss the strategy for advancing the work that has been specifically identified as your “fellowship” project as well as any other work you may be involved in, and your strategy for developing even further professionally.
There is no required template for the plan. However, for many fellows, the following information is relevant:
- The goals for the fellowship year, including research and activities that are not part of the fellowship project.
- For each project planned for the fellowship year, discuss the following:
- The specific research questions, research design, and current status. Brief description
- Precisely what you plan to accomplish in each project during the year.
- The logistics for completing the work. Identify the steps you plan take.
- Tasks that will require further training, specialized advice, and additional resources and how you will get this training, advice, and resources (e.g., coursework, workshop, consulting with researchers with specific expertise, applying for internal or external grants) and from whom specifically.
- How will your mentor help you achieve your goals? Include the expected frequency and length of meetings and correspondences, and the content of the meetings and correspondences. Discuss how they may provide you with contacts to experts who can give you specialized advice.
- How will others help you on specific tasks for specific projects? Include collaborators, faculty, staff, researchers at UW and elsewhere, community partners, etc.
- What else do you plan to do for your research and professional development and what role will your mentor play (e.g., apply for pre or post-doctoral fellowships, apply academic or nonacademic positions, submit papers for specific conferences) etc.
- If you are involved in other projects or paid or unpaid work, please discuss your time commitments to this work
Suggestions
If you will be working on multiple projects, please note that reports are typically organized around projects rather than the sections of the report. In other words, you would have a separate section for each project, where you would provide the relevant information about that project, identifying which is the dissertation/fellowship project. If you are working on individual papers for any project, you could make subsections and write the report for each paper. However, if two or more papers share the same tasks that you plan to work on this year (e.g., literature review/data work/analysis/etc.), you could break out the discussion of the common work if that makes sense for what you write.
Consider which, if any, information could be conveyed more clearly in lists or bullet points or visuals. An example would be a list of tasks that you plan to accomplish for a paper or project (e.g., write proposal to get permission to extract x data, reconfigure z data to be in y format, design the analysis of x, figure out what model is appropriate to estimate the relationship between x and y, etc.).