Editorial: Improving summer funding

Correction appended

As classes resume after spring break, many students are planning to complete various projects during the upcoming summer vacation. A prime concern for those hoping to participate in various unpaid activities — such as public sector internships or senior thesis research — is securing funding for the summer. Various agencies within the University supply the student body with a valuable resource by providing grants to students engaging in such activities. The deadlines to apply for such funding, however, tend to fall relatively early in the semester: The deadline to submit an application for summer thesis research funding, for example, passes at 11:30 tonight. Setting these deadlines so early in the semester places an unnecessary strain on students, and the University should push the deadlines back to sometime in late April.

Rising seniors in any A.B. department are able to obtain money to finance summer research for their theses from a variety of academic departments, programs and offices. In order to obtain such funding, students are required to submit a highly detailed research proposal, including a full budget and an evaluation of the proposal by their thesis adviser. Understandably, it is often difficult for juniors to produce such a proposal by this point in the semester. Many juniors may not have a thesis topic that is developed enough to produce a sufficiently well-thought-out application — many, after all, are still settling on a topic for their spring junior independent work. More importantly, though, this point in the semester is an extremely bad time for faculty advisers to work with juniors on turning an inchoate idea into a rigorously defined set of research questions. Members of the Class of 2010 are working frantically to complete their theses, and faculty members quite rightly devote the bulk of their attention to seniors. Indeed, in many departments, the process of selecting thesis advisers has barely begun. Consequently, the early deadline forces students to make important decisions about their thesis topics without sufficient input from advisers. These problems would be resolved if the deadline were pushed back to late April, after most seniors have completed their theses: Juniors would have both more time and more faculty advising while developing their research topics.

A similar problem exists with the funding provided by various University offices for students pursuing unpaid internships over the summer. A large number of internships in the public sector and in think tanks have extremely late application deadlines, and hence students applying for such internships are not informed of their acceptances until well after they have missed the deadlines for University funding. As a result, many students interested in pursuing such internships are dissuaded from doing so — a particularly unfortunate consequence given the University’s stated desire to increase student interest in these fields. Again, delaying the final deadline to apply for funding would resolve the problem.

Admittedly, delaying these deadlines would decrease the amount of time the University staff has to read over the applications and make their decisions about awarding funding. Nonetheless, this delay would dramatically increase the effectiveness of the University’s various summer funding programs. Princeton is fortunate to be able to offer its students summer funding, and it should distribute these funds in a way that provides access to more students.

Correction

The original editorial incorrectly stated that the Pace Center offers summer funding for unpaid internships that students arrange on their own and that the application deadline for this funding is too early. In fact, the Pace Center no longer offers summer funding for internships students arrange on their own.