As of next year, Freshman fellows will be required to finish one publishable research project by the end of their first year.
The change was put in place due to historically low numbers of communications students doing research during their four years at Elon.
"It's something that I came up with. We were looking at sort of what our communications students were doing within the school and we were finding our students are not applying for Lumen prizes as much as they should, they are not applying for SURF or SHORE, and I thought 'Well, what can I do to kind of encourage that,'" said Dr. Naeemah Clark, Director of the Communications Fellows.