Undergraduate Operations Research Competition

This article is published in the June/July 2012 issue of MAA FOCUS.

The INFORMS Undergraduate Operations Research Prize Competition is held to honor a student or group of students who conducted a significant applied project and/or original and important research in operations research or management science, broadly defined, while enrolled as an undergraduate student. For instance, this could be research conducted as part of a course, research assistantship, independent study project, internship, or senior thesis. To enter, eligible participants should submit a paper to ferhun@stanford.edu by July 2, 5 p.m. Pacific Time. Full eligibility and submission guidelines can be found below. The prize is $500 plus travel support to attend the INFORMS Annual Meeting. All entrants satisfying the eligibility requirements will be invited to present their research at an undergraduate research showcase session(s) at the annual meeting.

Conditions for Eligibility:

The following conditions must be met for eligibility:

1. Entrants must submit a paper (can be previously published or unpublished) presenting original research results.

2. The entrants are defined to be any coauthors on this paper who were enrolled as undergraduate students for at least one term within the 12 months prior to the award submission deadline in the year the paper is submitted for consideration, and who were undergraduate students at the time the project or research was conducted. The student(s) must have made a substantial contribution to the project and been the primary author(s) of the paper with only minor editorial assistance.

3. One or more faculty, graduate student or postdoctoral advisors may appear as coauthors of a paper, but at least one student entrant must be the first author.

4. A brief statement confirming the entrants’ eligibility and detailing the entrants’ contribution to the research should be submitted by the entrants’ research adviser or another faculty member familiar with the entrants’ work. To encourage cross-discipline submissions, the faculty adviser need not be an INFORMS member.

5. An entrant can be a (co)author in at most one paper submitted to the competition.

6. The paper must not have won a prize in a previous year of this competition. The paper must use double spacing, 11-point (or larger) font, and 1-inch (or larger) margins (left, right, top, and bottom). The entire paper (including bibliography, appendixes, figures, etc.) must not exceed 25 pages, and except for those containing references, each page should contain no more than 35 lines of text. Attached to the paper should be an abstract of the work, not to exceed 100 words. This abstract will be used in the program for the undergraduate research showcase session of the INFORMS Annual Meeting.