The McNair Scholars Program at Southeast Missouri State University held their third McNair Moment session this semester from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 31 in the University Center Program Lounge, located on the third floor.

The McNair Scholars Program is part of the TRIO Program and is an organization that helps graduate students in their studies and research.

Southeast is one of over 200 colleges in the United States to have the program, which was named after Ronald McNair, an African-American scientist who died in 1986 with the rest of the crew on the spaceship Challenger.

At the recent session entitled, "How to write a literature review," Michael Ignacio, TRIO Intake Specialist and McNair representative, informed the students on how to properly perform this task. Rather than being a typical literature paper like one that is due for an undergraduate class, this review is one of the many sections within the eight page research papers written by the students involved in the McNair program.

The students in attendance were Allen Rice, a business management and human resources major, Robert Turner, an environmental science major and Curstan Dye, an agriculture business and industry major.

Ignacio gave the students who attended a book titled, "Writing Literature Reviews," by Jose L. Galvan. Ignacio proceeded to present the first chapter of the book and encouraged the students to use the remainder of the book when putting together their research papers.

After the session, Rice said that he had never known how to do an in-depth literature review before.

"This is all new to me," Rice said. "Knowledge is power."

The students can put the information they learned to use planning and writing their research papers.