Senior Sequence

Honors

HONORS SEMINAR ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS AND APPLICATION PROCESS

If you seek honors as part of your USP major, you must apply for admission into the Spring quarter USP Honors Seminar. Taking the Seminar in and of itself does not guarantee honors—that depends on your performance in the seminar.

To be eligible for honors (and to enroll in the Honors Seminar) you must have a 3.5 (or higher) GPA in the USP major. To enroll in the Honors Seminar you must also have permission of the instructor.

To enroll in the Honors Seminar, please assemble the application material outlined below. The deadline to submit your application is Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010.  You can turn it in to Professor Pezzoli in class or turn it in to Valorie Bruce in SSB 315 .

HONORS APPLICATION PACKET

1. An extended abstract of your proposed honors research. By “extended” we mean an abstract about 300 - 600 words in length (significantly more than the 150 word limit on your SRP proposal abstract). Your extended abstract should include:

• Central theme or hypothesis: what question are you trying to address?
• Approach and methodology: how will you address that question?
• Relevance of your work to planning education, practice, or scholarship
• Key data sources
• 3-5 major references

2. A note of explanation (200 words or less) indicating how your honors work relates to the SRP you will have completed during the winter quarter.

3. A sample of your writing (10 pages or less, an excerpt from your SRP would be good).

4. Suggest a faculty member you may want as your honors thesis advisor. Indicate if you have already gotten their support.

5. Include a copy of your transcript.

FAQ: Can/should my honors thesis build upon my Senior Research Project (SRP)?

ANSWER: If you want to write an honors thesis, we strongly recommend that you build upon the research you completed during the Senior Sequence. Doing so will give you a running start. It is possible, however, that you could build upon some other body of research you may have accumulated. Perhaps you have a topic you’d like to build upon for honors from another research-based class (other than the Senior Sequence), or from an internship or job-related experience. That’s ok too. The important thing is that you have a clear sense of what you want to do (i.e., a clear research question) and a viable plan for addressing said question in ten weeks (i.e., a doable research design).

To build upon your SRP, please make it clear in your honors application that you plan to include significant new work. By significant we mean adding a new angle to your original SRP question, a new methodological approach, and/or a major improvement in your SRP’s original research design. One way to improve the research design would be to expand the original study’s scale and/or substantive scope (i.e., bringing in more case studies, making the study comparative, including more data sources, analytical tools, etc).