An Honors Thesis or Project is a sustained inquiry or application of a focused idea or skills, allowing the student to develop subject-matter expertise, thorough research or practice, and intensive project management skills. It represents the culmination of a student's undergraduate experience in the Honors Program. All students must complete 3 hours from HONR 498R: Honors Thesis and/or HONR 499R: Honors Project. Students may begin their Honors Thesis during their junior year if they are prepared. If a student's major department requires a comparable course (with a substantial written component), students may complete the same project for both courses.
Topics should be determined by the student's interests and based on a background of adequate coursework or other preparation in the area of interest. Frequently, Honors Program students propose interdisciplinary theses, which bring together several areas of interest and represent topics which might not encompass a specific program. Students will develop a formal proposal for a thesis topic during the first semester of HONR 498R or HONR 499R.
The Honors Thesis or Honors Project is a two-semester endeavor, which results in 45-50 typed pages of research, analysis, and synthesis (or a similar time commitment to a project with some kind of public component, e.g., a performance, laboratory research, scientific poster session, conference presentation, a workshop, publication in an academic or creative journal, etc.) on a topic approved by the student's Faculty Committee.
The Honors Program is designed around intensive, face-to-face interaction. Honors students typically complete at least one Honors course per semester; scholarship students are required to do so, but may petition for exceptions. In their first two semesters, all Honors students must complete Ancient Legacies (HONR 2000) and Modern Legacies (HONR 2100), as well as Honors Colloquium (HONR 100R). Course descriptions for the Legacies courses, which vary in focus each semester, are available under the Curriculum section of the Honors homepage. Colloquium is a 1-credit course that includes on-campus lectures on a wide-range of topics combined with cohort building activities emphasizing cultural, outdoor, and academic activities. These include trips to premier arts venues, guest lecturers from the academic and professional communities, outdoor recreation activities, reading groups, and community or campus service projects.
In order to graduate with the Honors designation on the transcript, a student must do the following:
