Honors Program

Honors Courses are inquiry-oriented, with a limited enrollment.  Topics vary from semester to semester and discipline to discipline. All Honors Courses you are required to take count toward your graduation requirements, and they do not increase your overall course load. Of the three required Honors courses, at least one can be an introductory level course, such as ENG 102 or PSY 100.  Other course opportunities include more advanced courses, which are designed to count toward general studies or concentration requirements.

An Honors module gives you the opportunity to take a regular course for Honors credit by supplementing or replacing some 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 specific details. This consultation should take place as soon as possible, but 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 as 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.

An Honors module 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 Module Proposal Form 

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 want to consider taking an Honors independent study in conjunction with your Senior Honors Project, during either your junior or senior year.

By your junior year (or earlier), you should begin selecting your project topic, advisor, and two readers.

Your advisor must be a full-time Albright faculty member and will work most closely with you throughout the project.

Your readers must also be full-time Albright faculty members. Typically:

• One reader is from within your department

• One reader is from outside your department

This combination allows you to receive feedback from both a subject-area specialist and a well-informed non-specialist.

By the end of your junior year, you must submit a form to the Coordinator of Senior Honors Projects listing your topic and including signatures from your advisor and readers.

If you and your advisor believe it is important to include an adjunct faculty member or non-Albright faculty member as a reader, a written explanation—signed by your advisor—must be submitted explaining the need for this exception.

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 an ACRE Grant to support this part of your research.

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 Online Senior Thesis Proposal Form. The Honors Committee will review your proposal and let you know of any revisions its members would like you to make.

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 be helpful to know that many successful proposals in the past have been about two to three pages before they were submitted via the online form.

Your final proposal will be submitted electronically using the Online Senior Thesis Proposal Form, you should use the following guide to draft your proposal. You will then be able to copy and paste the contents of your proposal into the web form for submission. Your thesis proposal must contain the following sections:

• An account of how you became interested in the project.
• Your goals for the project.
• A tentative hypothesis or thesis; for art/theatre projects, a contextualization of your goals.
• Your proposed methods of inquiry.
• A summary of preliminary research.
• A preliminary bibliography.
• A timeline for the project containing a brief outline of monthly progress goals.

The Honors Committee will flag proposals that lack a clear goal, hypothesis, or context. Also, proposals that do not contain a sufficient bibliography and timeline will be returned for revision. Please be sure to include all seven of the sections listed above in your proposal. 

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 on a project as large as this. Be sure to include in your 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 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.

Thesis submission involves three stages.

1. You must submit your thesis to your advisor and readers, who will make suggestions for changes. (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.)

2. 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 adviser and readers that your thesis is stronger without following it.)

3. 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 entrusts the review of the content of your thesis to your adviser 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 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.

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 to present your work orally (using slides, overheads, or Power Point as needed) or during the Honors Week poster session.

Oral presentations are 15 minutes long, plus time for a few questions from the audience. 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 have typically been presented in Klein. If you choose to present your research via a poster, you will be expected to be present to answer questions about it during the honors week poster session in the Center for the Arts Mezzanine.