Honors Thesis Handbook
The Senior Honors Thesis Handbook contains all of the detailed information required for students and their advisors. If you believe a thesis might be valuable to you but still need more information, please plan to attend a Senior Honors Thesis information meeting.
The Senior Honors Thesis/Project is both an opportunity and a challenge. Certainly the completion of this work looks good on a resume and provides an apprenticeship in professional knowledge and skills that will have its pragmatic benefits later. But the work is important and worthy first of all for the intellectual and creative process in which it engages you personally. Choosing a topic to which your curiosity and ambition have led you, working closely with a professional expert, doing sustained work of significant scope and substance, learning more about your subject, but also about your own capabilities, all make this experience unusual and rewarding. To ensure that this work is the best it can be, we hold out high expectations, support you along the way, and celebrate your results. But the main responsibility is obviously yours. The more serious your effort, the greater your satisfaction will be.
The thesis/project is not a requirement for all Honors students. It is, however, a requirement for Graduation with Honors from the Honors College. Normally completed over three semesters, the thesis/project is consistently considered by students to be the most academically or creatively challenging and intellectually rewarding work done as an undergraduate. Honors theses vary considerably in the different disciplines. While many theses involve traditional research, many are creative in nature. Students have completed novels, poems, translations, magazine prototypes, flight manuals, paintings and sculptures, architectural models, marketing plans, and newspaper ethics handbooks.
This handbook is designed to answer questions you may have as you consider whether or not the thesis/project is a good choice for you; to provide the guidelines for proposing and then working on your thesis; and to provide direction on the important formatting requirements for the final manuscript. There are sections in this handbook for the thesis advisor and for the defense committee members. Please refer to the thesis handbook often.
If, after reading the handbook, the student or faculty advisor still has questions concerning the preparation of the manuscript, contact the thesis coordinator for additional clarification and details.
The Handbook resources are available online, but the handbook is available for download or in print in the Honors College.
Thesis Handbook Resources
- Getting Started
- Expenses & Sponsorship
- Formatting the Thesis
- The Oral Defense
- Submitting the Final Manuscript