What Are the Requirements
of the Honors Program?

Once you have joined the Honors Program, you must satisfy three requirements in order to complete the Program successfully. You must

• Take three Honors course units
• Maintain the requisite grade point average
• Successfully complete a Senior Honors Project.

These requirements are explained in more detail below.

Honors Courses
The Honors Courses you are required to take all count toward the total required for graduation. These courses do not increase your overall course load; instead, they make it possible for you to fulfill some of your course requirements in an enriched way. Of the three Honors courses you take, at least one can be an introductory level course, such as ENG 102, or PSY 100, as well as more advanced courses. These courses are designed to also count towards general studies or concentration requirements. Honors courses are inquiry-oriented courses with a limited enrollment; topics vary from semester to semester and discipline to discipline.

You may also complete your unit requirements using Honors modules, or an Honors independent study. You must complete two of these courses by the end of your sophomore year and the third by the end of your junior year in order to remain a member in good standing of the Honors Program. (If there is a specific reason why you are waiting longer than usual to fulfill these requirements, please be sure to speak with your advisor and the director of the Honors Program).

Honors Modules: An Honors module gives you the opportunity to take a regular course for Honors credit by supplementing or replacing part of the course requirements with a special Honors project. These projects vary from course to course, so you will want to consult with the professor teaching the course to work out the specific details. This consultation should take place as soon as possible, but no optimally no later than the first week of the semester in which you are taking the course. You must take the initiative in setting up this meeting, and you are encouraged (although not required) to arrive at the meeting with a suggestion of what your project might entail. Students are encouraged to have regular meetings with the instructor be a part of any module they design. Students are also encouraged to put the plans for the module in writing so that expectations for both student and instructor are explicit.

If you have a choice between taking an Honors course and an Honors module, it's usually preferable to take the Honors course. On some occasions, however, an Honors module may be precisely what you want, since it may give you an opportunity to explore in greater depth a topic that is studied only in non-Honors courses. An Honors module also makes it possible to use a regular course to meet your Honors requirements, as well as possibly a general studies or concentration requirement. This may be particularly useful if you have a scheduling conflict with the Honors courses that are being offered.

Honors Independent Study: An Honors independent study gives you the opportunity to arrange a specialized study with a particular professor. This makes it possible for you to explore specific areas of interest that are beyond the scope of regular course offerings. You may well want to consider taking an Honors independent study in conjunction with your Senior Honors Project, either during your junior or senior year.

Grade Point Average
In order to join the Honors Program, to remain a member in good standing, and to graduate with College Honors, you must maintain a cumulative grade point average of 3.5 or higher.
If your cumulative grade point average falls to between 3.5 and 3.25 , you may remain in the Program on a probationary status. Students on probationary status do not have the privilege of registering early for classes. (See Section IV of this guide for more information on the privilege of registering early.) If your cumulative grade point average falls below 3.25 , you will not be allowed to continue in the Program. If you bring your cumulative grade point average back up to the probationary level, however, you may apply for readmission to the Program.

Senior Thesis
The Senior Thesis gives you a wonderful opportunity to conduct independent research. Although the project will likely be in your area of concentration (or one of them, if you have several), the possibilities are endless. Students in the past have chosen a wide variety of different projects. Some have combined them with independent study projects, study abroad, or Albright Creative and Research Excperience (ACRE) Grants. If you would like more information on opportunities for study abroad, stop by the Study Abroad Office, located in the Career Development Center in the South Wing of Selwyn Hall, or give them a call at 610-921-7648. For more information on ACRE Grants, contact the Provost's Office.

Here are a few examples of projects students completed last year that might help give you an idea of what is possible. If you would like to find out more about these students' projects, you will be interested to know that most of these students were interviewed on "The Albright Scholar". Tapes of these interviews are available in the library. Also available in the library are copies of the Honors theses submitted by these and other students during the past years.

As part of her interest in children's theory of mind, Allison Steinmeyer '03 looked at what young children understand about emotions, especially as they can be conceptualized as either actions or mental states or both. Her project took her to daycare, where she was responsible for developing a method to ask this question experimentally, and persuading three to five-year-olds to participate.

Audrey Smeltzer '02 completed a college honors thesis that encompassed all of her academic interests. Her project included synthesizing organic molecules and analyzing how these molecules absorbed radio frequency radiation when placed in a strong magnetic field. Her experimental data compared favorably to predictions she made using combinatorial mathematics. Audrey's novel results will be published in chemical literature.

The shift in absorption spectra of dyes in solvents (their pi star value) is now being used by many chemists to predict chemical properties in both liquid solvents and supercritical fluids. Until recently, while there were theoretical predictions of the relationship between solubility and pi star, there were few experimental studies. Bryan Platt '01 began a study of the correlation by measuring both pi star and the solubility of salicylic acid in about 25 solvents with 4-nitroanisole as the dye. Kelly Bieber '04 continued these studies. She examined the effect of the structure of various polar solute molecules on the extent of the correlation. Robert Luo '04 began a similar study for nonpolar molecules so he could compare it with the results of studies on polar molecules.

Kathy Cunniffe '02 presented a portion of her senior honors thesis on Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes at the annual conference of the Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies held at the University of Delaware. It was subsequently published in the selected proceedings of the conference and helped Kathy win a fellowship in the graduate program in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Following a summer spent as an interpreter/guide in Yosemite National Park, Christina Niescier Hinkson '02 wrote a policy thesis about a recent movement to decommission a 100-year-old dam built within its boundaries. The Hetch-Hetchy Dam is one of a handful targeted by environmentalists for removal and restoration to a more natural state. Her thesis presented the history of the dam and the movement to decommission it, evaluated the costs of removal (including the likely construction of a dam elsewhere), and compared the effort with similar proposals elsewhere.

Economics major Roshani de Silva '03 focused her departmental honors thesis on poverty in the local area. Using Census 2000 data, which was just released three months before she started her project, Roshani examined income level, unemployment and poverty rates in 82 sections of the City of Reading and how they were related to education, nationality, language spoken and household characteristics. A main focus of her thesis involved comparing outcomes experienced by primarily Hispanic communities in Reading to the primarily Caucasian areas of Reading.

The work these students did may seem so impressive as to be a bit daunting, but with discipline and forethought, you too will be able to conquer the great challenge of conducting an independent research project. At the end of the process, you will be in a position to understand why one of our recent graduates described her Senior Honors Project as being the greatest educational experience of her college career.

Your project will consist of some type of research, a written presentation of that research in the form of a thesis, and a personal presentation of that research to the Albright College community. There are several major deadlines you must keep in mind to remain on track with the project. They are described below, and calendars are provided for students who are graduating.

Choosing a Topic, Advisor, and Readers: In your junior year (or even earlier in some cases), you will want to select your topic, your advisor, and two readers. Near the end of your junior year, you must submit a form to the Coordinator of Senior Honors Projects, indicating what your topic will be and bearing the signatures of your advisor and readers. Your advisor, who must be a full-time member of the Albright faculty, will be the person working with you most closely on your project. Assuming your project is in your area of concentration, one of your readers will come from within your department, and one will be from outside your department. This will allow you to receive feedback both from specialists and from a well-educated non-specialist. Like your advisor, your readers must also be full-time members of the Albright faculty. In the case that you and your advisor both agree that it is important to include as a reader an adjunct member of the faculty or someone not on Albright's faculty, you must submit an explanation, signed by your advisor, detailing why it is important to include this individual as a reader.

Summer Research: Although project timelines vary, you will almost certainly want to conduct serious work on your project over the summer before your senior year. This may involve preparing a detailed bibliography, doing background reading, collecting data, or engaging in laboratory work; and it may be conducted at home, on campus, or at a special site in the U.S. or abroad. You may want to consider applying for a ACRE Grant to support this part of your research.

Submitting a Proposal: Shortly after the beginning of the fall semester of your senior year, you will submit a proposal to your advisor and readers. They will review your proposal and make suggestions on how to improve it. After making the necessary changes, you will submit your proposal to the Honors Committee via the Coordinator of Senior Honors Projects. The Honors Committee will review your proposal and let you know of any revisions its members would like you to make.

Since each discipline has its own format for writing proposals, the Honors Committee does not issue specific guidelines for their preparation. You should work closely with your advisor to determine which format is most widely accepted in your discipline. The American Psychological Association, for example, has adopted a specific set of guidelines for writing proposals. If you are proposing a research project in Psychology, you will want to follow these guidelines. In spite of the differences in format across the disciplines, however, all proposals must contain certain readily identifiable elements. Be sure to include the following six elements in your proposal:

• A Senior Honors Project Proposal Form with the signatures of your advisor and readers.
• A brief abstract summarizing your proposed research and the method of inquiry you plan to use.
• A description of the problem or question you will be researching. (Be sure to include a clear statement of your thesis or hypothesis, to make appropriate references to background literature, and to indicate why your project is an important one. It may help to indicate how you became became interested in your project in the first place.)
• A description of the research and/or creative methods you will follow.
• A timeline for completion of various stages of the project.
• A lengthy bibliography.

As you write your proposal, keep in mind that you will be submitting it to the Honors Committee, which includes faculty members from a variety of disciplines. Make sure that your writing is clear and that your thoughts are as accessible as possible to a wide audience.

There is no specified length for your proposal. More important than its length is its thoroughness and clarity. It may help you to know, though, that successful proposals in the past have typically run to 3-4 typed, double-spaced pages of description.

Submitting the Rough Draft: One reason it is important for you to construct a timeline for completing the various stages of your project is that it will help you avoid the devastating effects of procrastinating a project as large as this. Be sure to include in that timeline the submission of a rough draft to your advisor and readers in late February. (Check the calendar at the end of this section for the exact date.) This is an important step in ensuring that you are on track to finish your project on time. The further along you are at this stage, of course, the more time you will have for revising and polishing your thesis. Depending on your topic, you may well find this task of revising and polishing to be the most important part of your entire project. If done well, this part of independent research can be very rewarding and can result in whole new levels of clarity and insight.

Submitting the Thesis: Thesis submission involves three stages. First, you must submit your thesis to your advisor and readers, who will make suggestions for changes. (In order to avoid unpleasant surprises at this stage, you will want to make sure that you have been working closely with them throughout the entire process.) Second, you will revise your thesis in accordance with the suggestions made. (If you disagree with a particular suggestion, you will want to create a compelling argument to convince your advisor and readers that your thesis is stronger without following it.) Third, you will submit the final copy of your thesis to the Honors Committee via the Coordinator of Senior Honors Projects. Your thesis must be accompanied by a signed cover page, a library release form, and an abstract. At this point, the Honors Committee trusts the review of the content of your thesis to your advisor and readers and merely checks to make sure that the thesis and its accompanying forms are all complete and submitted on time.

The Honors Committee has not set a minimum length requirement for your thesis. Its length will depend on your project and especially on the discipline in which you are working. In general, theses in the sciences tend to be shorter than those in the humanities, since their main point is usually to report the results of experiments or the interpretation of data. As a general guideline, if you are writing a thesis in the sciences, you may want to aim for 20-30 pages. If you are writing one in the humanities, on the other hand, you will probably want to aim for 40-50 pages.

Presenting Your Research: One of the most exciting aspects of your research will be the presentation of your conclusions to a campus-wide audience. You will be asked to present your research to the Albright College community during Honors Week in the Spring. You may choose whether to present your work orally-using slides, overheads, or Power Point as needed-or during poster sessions.

Oral presentations are 15 minutes long, including time for a question or two from the audience. You will want to give a 15-20 minute talk about your project, leaving 10-15 minutes for discussion at the end. Since your audience may contain faculty and students from a variety of disciplines, you should try to make your presentation as accessible to them as reasonably possible. If your project is quite technical, you should at least be able to explain simply and clearly its larger context and importance before proceeding to the parts that only a specialist would be able to follow. Presentations and posters have typically been presented in the Faculty Lounge. If you choose to present your research via a poster, sessions will be scheduled during which you will be expected to be present to answer questions about it.