Senior Thesis

Senior Thesis

Each Honors student writes a senior thesis in their major. All majors in Fordham College accept the Honors thesis as a course to be counted toward the major requirements. Double-majors choose which major the thesis will fulfill. The thesis cannot be done in a minor.

The senior thesis is an independent research project initially proposed in spring of Junior year by the student, and designed and written under the guidance of a faculty mentor in the major. Students choose their own mentors and work closely with them on the thesis. Humanities theses are around 35-40 pages (sometimes more). The final document is defended before a three-person Faculty Committee.   The thesis defense is a capstone experience for an Honors student.

Humanities students enroll for the thesis in either the fall or spring semester of senior year. It is strongly suggested that students register and complete the thesis in the fall, as the spring deadline required for graduation clearance is actually earlier than the end of the semester. In the sciences, the thesis is a two-semester project; the student registers for the thesis in one of the two senior semesters, and for a science research course in the other, as advised by the major department. All students participate in a non-credit senior thesis seminar, with the director of the Honors Program. In this seminar, which meets about every two weeks, students present their research projects to their peers for questions and suggestions.   The setting is informal, and presenters are also responsible for refreshments.

Students should start thinking about the thesis project as early as possible, particularly regarding the selection of a mentor.

Some Recent Thesis Titles:

v        Scoring Goals and Slaying the Vampire: 'Girl Power' and Third-Wave Feminism in 1990s American Culture         (Christine Ford ‘07, American Studies)

v     Masculinity in Massachusetts: Becoming a Man in the Diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841-1842 (Patrick Farmer ‘05, Anthropology)

            Winner of the Rev. J. Franklin Ewing, S.J. Memorial Award

v     Magnetochemical Effects in Chromatographic Separations
(Margaretta Dimos ‘05, Chemistry)

v      Welcome to the O.C.: The Transformation of Television Melodrama from Peyton Place to Newport Beach (Amber Callaghan ‘06, Communication and Media Studies)

v      Crime of Fashion: An Analysis of the Counterfeit Luxury Handbag Market
(Robert Cilento ‘06, Economics)

v      Let No One Try, Then, To Look for Any Kind of a Thesis: The Influence of Oral Narrative Traditions on the Modern African Novel (Emily Pontzer ‘05, English)

v      Earth, Sweet Earth: An Ecocritical Evaluation of the Poetry and Prose of Gerard Manly Hopkins (Kevin McKenna ‘07, English)

            Winner of the Charles J. Donahue Prize.

v      Franz Schubert’s Masses in A flat and E flat, Nos 5 and 6: Subjectivity, Spirituality, and the Viennese Concerted Mass (Andrew Puntel ‘04, Music)

v     Predicting Attitudes Towards Authority Based on Personality in a University Residential Life Setting (Kathy Alarcon ‘07, Psychology)
To be published in Psi Chi Journal