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Path to PCA: An Overview

Fall Term

• Stage 1:
  • Understanding how the club works
  • This club centers on you researching and creating an original academic idea concerning your loved narratives.
  • If it's Sci-Fi and/or Fantasy, it'll do.
  • We also have possibiliteis of working in pyschology with Dr. Kuhlman. Ask me.
  • Topics can be from many different narrative sources:
    • comics
    • graphic novels
    • novels
    • animated films and series
    • TV shows
    • films
    • videos games
• Stage 2: Finding Sources
  • Mining ideas from sources on the weboverse.
  • Explore an entire universe of ideas and concepts outside the more simplistic expressions of youtube and twitter.
  • Part of this stage is learning how to differentiate the academic-idea built articles from the pedestrian, parasitical passages on social media/youtube and in sensationalist magazines.
• Stage 3:
  • How to keep track of those sources
  • Ebbinghaus proved that we will forget 75% of what we learned just one week later.
  • We all need a method to better remember the various sources supporting our research.
• Stage 4
  • Slamming ideas and narratives together to forge a new concept
  • This is where it's at; founding a new, original, never-heard-of idea, concerning your loved narratives.
  • "Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see." ― Arthur Schopenhauer
• Stage 5
  • Spelunking databases to find academic sources
  • Deeper and more unheard of than academically built popular written ideas are peer reviewed journal articles, where academics talk to like-minded academics about their research.
  • You are about to "meet" academics who spend their lives, their careers, talking about that very thing you love.
  • Research must involve peer-reviewed sources. Without peer-reviewed sources, you are not researching, but simply collecting or foraging.
• Stage 6
  • Writing a 300 word abstract of your new concept/idea
  • One page, double spaced.
  • A concise discussion of your overall new idea and sub-points.
• Stage 7
  • Learning layout/design to create a new poster
  • This is the way...of the digital world.
  • If it looks bad, people will think it is bad, from power points to websites.
  • At this stage, you'll learn how to speak visually
• Stage 8
  • Over two weeks, babbling each week (speaking) for 5-10 minutes then 10 minutes
  • There's plenty of research revealing that public speaking is people's worst fear.
  • This ain't that.
  • It's not public speaking when it's a topic you love and the audience seeks out YOU because they WANT to hear what YOU have to say.

Spring Term

• Stage 8
  • Attending URE in late Fall term
  • Afternnoon on Melbourne Campus postering
  • The campus will provide transportation and the absence in any missed classes is excused.

• Stage 10
  • Postering at FURC in Jan/Feb
  • Two days at University of Central Florida; one hour of discussing your poster to passers-by.

• Stage 11
  • Presenting at PCA/ACA
  • Five days & four nights at Marriot Copley in Boston.
  • 15 minute presentation of your research