The Presidential Scholarship provides one full semester's tuition to be applied to the student's senior year or a $5,000 graduate fellowship, and $2,500 for research expenses for the summer preceding the student's senior year. The project must continue for at least one semester in the senior year, and receives a maximum of 4 credits for the project (no more than three credits in one semester). Approximately two scholarships are available each year. Students may apply for these competitive scholarships as juniors. Presidential Scholarship projects may extend a student's senior thesis, or allow them to pursue independent work. Recent presidential scholars have:

• Examined the effects of spatial snag distribution on nesting bird species in ponderosa pine forests of the eastern Cascades
• Analyzed use-restriction policies in national parks
• Explored the contemporary historical and political applications of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology
• Studied fin-de-siecle European cultural and intellectual life
• Applied Q-Ball theory to the study of unstable particles
• Assessed the relationship of discrepancies between self-views and perceived other-views to self-handicapping, conformity, and extrinsic goal behaviors

The Presidential proposal deadline is March 14, 2013. Past successful proposals are on file and available for review in the office of Student Academic Grants and Awards, 206 Collins Science Center and in the Academic Commons at http://libmedia.willamette.edu/xmlui/handle/10177/2130