At first, it seems like any other small gathering: a couple professors and a student sit chatting on the couches of the Heritage Room. Moments later, the student stands to address a group that has come to hear a thesis defense.
Honors students defend their theses for a one-hour period. The first 10 minutes are dedicated to the presentation itself. The next 30 are set aside for questions from three professors: the student’s chosen faculty thesis advisor, second reader, and Associate Professor of History Richard Gamble, the head of the honors program. The last 20 minutes are for other members of the audience to ask any remaining questions.
“Idealistically, my hope for the honors thesis is that it will become more and more of a capstone experience for the students,” Gamble said, “a culmination of four years in the honors program for the students and a connecting point to the rest of campus.”
Students are evaluated on their presentations and familiarity with their topic. By the time the students present, they have already written a 20- to 35-page paper on a topic.
“I feel like 30 pages is far enough into a topic to go further into the topic than a normal college paper, but [in doing a thesis] we’ve also jumped into it enough to realize how much more there is and that we’ve really just barely scratched the surface,” senior Emily Schutz said.
Schutz presented her thesis, “‘But remember — For that’s my business to you:’ The Role of Wonder in Shakespeare’s Historical Memory,” on Wednesday.
Like many others, Schutz combined her interests and reached beyond a single discipline to develop the topic for her thesis.
“My topic was a combination of my two majors, so I took the two things I love the most — Shakespeare and the study of the different memories of history,” Schutz said. “So I studied Shakespeare’s histories. Dr. Smith is the foremost Shakespeare scholar on campus, and Dr. Gaetano’s specialty is the Renaissance, so I brought the two together.”
Gamble said the topic is up to the students as long as they can find faculty members interested in advising for their project, and as long as they write their proposal for the topic during the spring semester of their junior year. By the end, students spend more than a year preparing for their defenses between research and actually writing their paper.
Other students delve into subjects outside the purview of their majors.
Senior Erin Mundahl, despite being an English and French double-major, chose to look into the sociological and psychological topic of loners and society. She dubbed her thesis, “‘All the lonely people, where do they all come from?’: A Socio-Psychological Examination of the Loner in Society,” looking into a topic that, according to Mundahl, has not yet been studied intensely.
The thesis defense is a requirement for honors students for graduation. Each year, some students come insufficiently prepared, but Gamble said it is fairly rare, and more as a result of an incomplete or sub-par thesis paper, and not the defense itself. Sometimes a student will only pass conditionally, which entails corrections made after the defense, but that student may still graduate with the honors program as long as criteria are fulfilled.
Gamble said the best way to prepare is to attend others’ defenses, as the students know their topics by the time their peers are defending theirs. In the weeks leading up to a defense, it is knowing what to expect and having confidence that help a student most.