All submissions should be sent as an MS Word or PDF attachment to ascecubaoperations@gmail.com.

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Anyone interested in participating in the prize competition should observe the following guidelines:

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1. All authors must be enrolled in a higher educational institution, including community colleges, or have graduated from one of these institutions within a year of the submission date. Authors should clearly state whether they wish to compete in the graduate or undergraduate competition.

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2. Co-authored papers are welcome, but all authors must not be tenured or non-tenured faculty, postdoctoral fellows, or teaching assistants/fellows withholding a doctorate unless the degree was earned within a year of the prize submission deadline.

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3. The 5000-6000-word limit- including footnotes and references- will be strictly enforced.

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4. Listing the leading author or principal investigator’s contact information is required.

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5. Along with the paper, a cover letter and contact information must be submitted. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

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6. The competition winners are required to present their research at the ASCE annual conference to receive a stipend. All other students are welcome to present at the conference. The 15-20 minute presentation will be in person, but under some circumstances, and at the discretion of the prize committee, it may be delivered virtually via Zoom.

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7. The prize committee celebrates all academic and programmatic affiliations, intellectual persuasions, thematic considerations, and methodological diversity. At a minimum, all papers must address the following rubrics:

• an identifiable purpose or research question,

• a discernible thesis statement or main idea,

• sufficient and verifiable evidence to persuasively support the paper’s thesis or main idea, and

• an appropriate reference and bibliography. Any academic formatting styles are welcome if they are consistently applied throughout the paper.
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8. The prize committee reserves the right to check for plagiarism, including AI, and reject any submissions found to be in violation. The committee also reserves the right to suspend the competition for any unforeseen circumstance, and, in that case, submissions might be considered for the next competition after receiving a written request/consent from the principal investigator.

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Following Article II of the ASCE Bylaws and considering the current volatile academic environment, the prize committee reaffirms the principle of academic freedom and autonomy under which all non-advocacy, rigorous, evidence-based, exploratory research is welcome regardless of theoretical inclinations, thematic orientations, academic disciplines, and methodological approaches. In the case of field research, the committee assumes that the research for the paper was approved by an Institutional Review Board, or IRB.