Here's what you should do for next week's meeting. 1. Write down 3 possible topics for your term paper on an 8x11 piece of paper. Titles are enough. One topic should be from the list I gave you attached to the syllabus, and two should be of your own devising. 2. For each of those topics, look up and read at least one information source on the Web, and print out a copy of the first page for me. This doesn't have to be more than a page long; my intent is to have you do at least minimal research on each of the three topics, since that will help you know if there is any information out there at all. (For some topics, e.g., milk prices in Bloomington, you might not need Web information-- but look anyway.) Staple those 4 pages together, and hand them in to me at our meeting next week. We will discuss Bring your three topics and the references you found to our meeting next week. At the meeting, you, I, and the other people at the meeting will discuss whether your topics are interesting and practical, and help you to narrow them down.

For our meeting in the week of January 29, please pick one definite topic for your project and start doing background work. Type up three pages of background information that might serve as part of your paper's introductory section. Include a title page, including all the information listed in the writing instructions I gave out earlier (which are also on the website) except leaving the abstract blank.

For our meeting in the week of February 12, please write up (a) a one-page outline for your paper, (b) a description of some quantitative analysis you might do, and (c) at least one graph that will go in your paper. A description of the quantitative analysis is not the quantitative analysis itself. Rather, I'd like for you to think about what quantitative analysis would fit in the paper and write down some ideas. We'll discuss at the meeting whether they're good ideas or not.

The oral report sessions will begin soon. The oral report does not have to be a summary of your paper. Rather, it is a chance to practice talking about your topic. You can talk about the background to it, or something you plan to do with data, or pick one particular point that might be in your paper.

I would like you to turn in a first draft of your paper sometime in the interval March 7-March 25 (a week before Spring Break to a week after). I will comment on the drafts in the order I receive them, and if lots are handed in on March 25, you may not get comments back for a couple of weeks after that. But the timing is up to you, as long as you email me a copy by midnight March 25. Please begin the name of the computer file you email me with your last name, e.g. Smith-euro.pdf.

For our meeting in the week of March 26-28, please bring me a hardcopy of your draft if you have not given me one already. Be prepared to say what you think you need to do to revise it for the final draft.

I will give you a page written by someone else in your G492 office group for you to edit. Please edit it, suggesting improvements in details of the writing using either MS-Word's track-changes feature or colored pen in hardcopy, and give it to the original author during our office session in the last week of classes, or before. Please give me a copy also. This is your last chance to get comments before submitting the final draft. The purpose of this meeting is to address any questions that might arise in making the final push towards finishing.