Classes
Time: Fall: Fridays, 3:30 PM (after colloquium)
Place: AB 113 or 114

Researchers need to become/keep themselves up to date with the field. Hence, in addition to the classes, you are expected to attend

• G2000: three 15 minute talks by PhD students, postdocs, and faculty (W3 in Cody Hall [AB 107])
• Colloquia: 1-hour talks by (mostly) outside visitors at (F2 in Cody Hall [AB 107])

Lecturer
Prof. Marten van Kerkwijk
Office: MP 1203B, 416-946-7288
Email: mhvk@astro (add .utoronto.ca).

Course Description
In this directed research course for senior undergraduate students, you will apply all that you learned in the last years to a current research problem, under supervision of a faculty member. Specific goals are

• Get acquainted with real research (i.e., a priori unknown outcome).
• Acquire research, collaboration, and time-management skills.
• Learn to write scientific proposals, reports and papers in LaTeX.
• Practice delivering scientific presentations.

Advisers
Students will identify and contact potential research advisers, and should have chosen their superviser by the end of September 2011. Any research member of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics (DAA), Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), or Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics (DI) can serve as an adviser. In case a post-doctoral fellow or CITA visitor is an adviser, a faculty member from DAA, CITA or DI must be added as a co-adviser. The course instructor will help match students to advisers, but the most effective strategy is to meet in person with potential advisers after preliminary e-mail contacts (even when these meetings do not lead to research projects, they will acquaint you with knowledgeable and experienced people who may be able to help you later). A very useful source of information for advanced students are Prof. Chris Matzner's links for undergraduate researchers. It was created for AST 425 in 2003, and has been updated a few times.

The following are good places to see/meet advisers

• DAA Jamboree, with 1-3 min talks by faculty members (14 Sep; W3, Cody Hall [AB 107])
  The PhD student jamboree is Sep 21 (W3, Cody Hall). This may also give clues to which advisers have the most interesting projects and most enthusiastic students.
• CITA Jamboree, Sep 27 (T12, physics lounge [MP110]; includes free pizza)
• DAA Coffee, every day (M,R: astro-ph discussion), starting usually around 10:30 AM (AB, 2nd floor lounge).
• Post-colloquium snack and post-G2000 snack (F3, W4, resp., AB, 2nd floor lounge)
• CITA dessert (F4, MP 14th floor lounge).
• In their offices.

Course requirements (in bold: used for evaluation)

1. Find an adviser and a project. Ideally, the project should be useful and interesting to both the student and the adviser, and should contain a publishable research contribution, either as a separate publication or as part of adviser's publication. It should be a true new research contribution. The student will briefly (10 min) describe the plans for the project - as consulted with the adviser - during the class meetings on Sep 30 and Oct 7.
2. Discuss goals and expectations for the project with your adviser(s), and develop a research plan for the whole year. Plan to meet with the adviser on a weekly basis; see item 4 below.
3. Write up a project proposal (2-3 pages; 10% of the final mark) by Oct 31, 2011 (-5%/day for lateness, i.e., zero for reports two or more days late). The proposal should be formatted in LaTeX as this will give some practice for the final report (easiest may be to use the AASTex package). The proposal should explain the background and motivation for the project, as well as the research plan, in a compelling and persuasive manner. A hardcopy of the proposal must be delivered to the instructor and the adviser.
4. Meet with your adviser(s) regularly, at least once per week. Good communication is the key to good research. Both you and your adviser will enjoy these meetings a lot more if you arrive with new results and new questions each time.
5. Short progress reports by the end of each month, starting at the end of November 2010 (5% for five monthly reports). These should be e-mailed, with CC to the adviser. The reports should contain a paragraph or two describing your activities and progress. No points given for reports that are late.
6. Class participation (5%) for discussions after the talks; attendance of classes with lectures by the instructor and invited faculty members (e.g., on how to write a graduate school application, how to give a scientific talk and how to prepare a scientific paper).
7. Interim progress talk (20 minutes, 20%) early January, 2012 (precise date TBA). These will be in-class talks, not public events, with only advisers invited to attend. The research should be presented in a way sufficiently interesting to generate discussion.
8. Summary talk (20 minutes, 20%) in the AST 425 Jamborees, likely in the last week of classes (likely two meeting in G2000 slot, Mar 28 and Apr 4; to be confirmed). This will be a public event, with the advisers expected to attend, and other DAA/CITA/DI members invited.
9. Final report (9-12 pages, 40%) by Monday, April 2nd, 2011, 9 AM (-10%/day for lateness, i.e., zero for reports four or more days late). The report should be composed using LaTeX using one of the journal templates. Evaluatation will be jointly by the adviser and course instructor.

Enrolment
Students planning to take this course should e-mail the instructor before the end of August 2011. Please CC the undergraduate secretary (ungrad.sec@astro.utoronto.ca). Please use utoronto.ca e-mail addresses.

Links
For the LaTeX template to use for your reports, I strongly recommend using the AASTeX package (normally used for preparing manuscripts for ApJ, AJ, and PASP). Start with the documentation, and then download the required files (on Debian and Ubuntu, these are part of the texlive-publishers package).