GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH SUPPORT
The Graduate College provides limited funds to support certain kinds of graduate student research related to theses and dissertations. These programs award funds through a competitive application process held each semester; information about deadlines and application procedures are available on the Graduate College web site and will be forwarded by the department to the CMN-Grad listserv at regular intervals. The Graduate College also maintains a fellowship database that contains information about campus and external fellowship opportunities.
The Illinois Researcher Information Service (IRIS) is a unit of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign. The IRIS office compiles the IRIS Database of funding opportunities. The office also maintains a library of publications (informational brochures, application guidelines, and annual reports) from over 2,000 funding agencies. The IRIS Database of funding opportunities has been compiled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1979. It currently contains records on over 8,000 federal and private funding opportunities in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The IRIS Database is updated daily and is available in WWW and Telnet versions. For more information, see the IRIS web site here.
MENTORING THROUGH RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
The Department of Communication offers a formal mentoring program to foster working relationships between graduate and undergraduate students, help graduate students develop mentoring skills, and provide undergraduates with research and/or applied experience in the discipline. The mentoring program offers graduate students support in their mentoring endeavors, including help locating and screening interested undergraduate students, education and support in developing and maintaining mentoring skills, and text-based and interpersonal resources. The program also offers undergraduates a single point of contact (the Research Liaison) to whom they may express interest in or direct questions about the mentoring program. The program aims to match graduate and undergraduate students based on current or proposed research interests. If you are a graduate student looking for more information about this program, please contact the current Research Liaison, Lindsay Kelpinski. If you are a current undergraduate student, you may contact the Research Liaison and/or find more information about opportunities here.
RESEARCH INVOLVING HUMAN SUBJECTS
Although all research projects involving human subjects must be supervised by a faculty member, graduate students should be aware of the regulations that apply at the University of Illinois. All projects conducted by a researcher from the University of Illinois involving the use of human participants must be reviewed, either at the departmental or university level. This includes not only research you might conduct for possible publication, but also research that you conduct as part of a class project or research that a teaching assistant might assign to undergraduate students as part of a class project.
If you anticipate conducting research with human participants or assigning research projects to your students, you should allow ample time to complete a research proposal for review by the faculty member who will supervise you and then by the Campus Institutional Review Board or the department's Human Participants Committee. The departmental committee can consider applications for exemption from IRB review. Please visit the IRB website for more information. Additional information about campus policies is contained in The Handbook for Investigators, published by the Institutional Review Board, is available here.