Dear URNCST Journal Readers and Contributors,

I hope this email finds you all well! My name is Jeremy Y. Ng and I am the Editor of the URNCST Journal. In an effort to provide undergraduate students the opportunity to contribute to STEM research literature, we have established our novel Mentored Paper Initiative. Students that have been selected will have the opportunity to be partnered with a graduate student as they write a paper that is of publishable quality in the URNCST Journal. The topic of the paper will be in the graduate student’s area of expertise to allow them to more effectively guide the students throughout the writing process. Students will be mentored from the design stage to write up, and the final paper will be peer-reviewed by another graduate student, to allow the students to experience external-feedback. This opportunity provides undergraduate students the chance to improve their scientific writing skills and go through the entire process of writing an academic paper, while working under the supervision of a graduate student.

In our first cohort that took place during Summer 2020, we had an outstanding volume of submissions totalling near 100 abstracts, a competitive fraction of whom were paired with a graduate student mentor and wrote a manuscript. Many of these manuscripts are undergoing peer-review as we speak and we expect that the first ones will be published in just a few weeks! With the success that this program has garnered, we anticipate that this second round will be no different and invite YOU to submit an abstract before the deadline closes on November 27th, 2020 at 11:59pm EST.

To submit an abstract and learn more, please visit: https://www.urncst.com/index.php/urncst/mentored_paper

On behalf of the URNCST Journal team, we look forward to receiving your submission!

Be safe and stay well,

Jeremy Ng, MSc, PhD Candidate

Editor-in-Chief

Undergraduate Research in Natural and Clinical

Science and Technology (URNCST) Journal