At Science Day, the most outstanding presentations from each of the University's schools and colleges are recognized with honoraria. The University also confers matching awards to the recipients' laboratories, a President's Award, and a Provost's Award. It's not a contest. It's a way of honoring graduate research. Believe it or not, thesis research is generally more innovative, more on the cutting edge, less concerned with simply grinding out material than postdoctoral research.
Graduate research is the creative life force of all the research programs on both campuses.
Because the annual event is only six years old, Shepro says, claims about the contributions past honorees will make to the world of science would be premature. A patent is pending, Shepro says. One indirect benefit of the attention Science Day calls to graduate student work has been to provide good models for undergraduate scientists. Because they are often close in age to the researchers whose work they are viewing, many undergraduates see for the first time that science has a face, and that it resembles their own. It removes them momentarily from the formality of undergraduate scientific training and clues them in to the reality that this is what they're going to be doing in no time at all.