DEPARTMENT OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE

Political Science Senior Projects

Required project plan: This work plan should be written up as a Senior Project Prospectus. A hard copy of the prospectus must be filed with the Political Science department office. Department rules as stated in the General Bulletin say the prospectus should be filed with the department office no later than the drop/add date of each semester (Friday of the second week). The intent of this rule is to ensure that the prospectus is filed in time for the student to register for the course. That means, no instructor for a senior project should issue a permit for a student to register for the project until the faculty member and student have drafted the prospectus!

Each member of the faculty will have his or her own expectations of projects. All will expect some significant writing. They are also expected to require some delivery of work by the middle of the semester, and to reflect any failure to deliver work in the midterm grade report. Beyond those requirements, there are many forms of projects. Some will collect and analyze primary data. Others will be literature reviews. Some faculty members, such as myself, are willing to have a project in which the student begins by learning about a subject more generally, prepares reports on what they are learning, and then focuses in on a more precise paper topic towards the midpoint of the term. Others expect a more precise topic earlier. The most important things is to find a faculty member who feels comfortable advising on a topic and grading a study about it, and then to have a clear agreement about what you will be doing.

Oral presentations: As part of the requirements for a SAGES capstone, all projects need to be presented in a public forum. The political science department has been doing this in a format that somewhat resembles an academic conference, though with more and better food than is normal for political science conferences.

We have scheduled the presentations during the next-to-last week of each semester. The session runs from about 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., with a break for a buffet dinner in the middle. Refreshments are also available from the beginning. Students are divided into panels based on their topics and their supervisors. For example, in the Spring of 2009, we had seven panels, with three or four students on each. Four of the panels started around 5:00 p.m., and the other three around 7:00 p.m. Each student’s section of the panel lasted between 15 and 20 minutes. Students took 8-10 minutes to report on their work, and the rest of the time was for questions and comments from the audience.

This format is a version of what you would do at an academic conference. Other members of the panel and the audience give feedback on the work. The audience is not likely to be large, but the way we do this means that the students who are speaking in the earlier or later panels are expected to be there to listen to other students, and the department faculty is also present. The presentations also are open to other students if they wish to attend.

Students are not expected to have their final paper ready for presentation. They are expected to have done enough to be able to give a coherent and interesting talk. But one of the reasons for doing the presentations during the next to last week of classes is, that gives students time to think about comments made at the presentations when they write their final papers. This is similar to how most conferences work. At the American Political Science Association meeting, for example, most participants are presenting papers that they hope to eventually submit to journals, and they use the feedback to help them determine how to finalize the paper for submission.

Finding a project supervisor: Students are responsible for finding a supervisor for their topic. Your major advisor or the department chair should be available to discuss your interests and suggest which of their colleagues might fit those interests. Unless they are going to supervise the project, however, they cannot issue the permit. Whoever issues the permit has to do the grading, so only the actual supervisor can issue the permit. Also, as explained above, the permit should not be issued until the prospectus has been prepared.

Please note that there is no reason to feel you need the permit during the usual preregistration period. POSC 396 cannot “fill.” You should not, however, plan to show up during first week of a term and start looking for a topic and advisor. So planning ahead is good, registering ahead is unnecessary.

Occasionally a political science senior project is advised by a faculty member from another department of the college or unit of the university. This requires that the department chair approve so the department administrators can arrange it with the registrar, and of course that the faculty member be willing to do it. It almost always involves a student who wants to study some aspect of the law, and a faculty member of the School of Law.

The department is instituting a new policy about how many senior projects can be supervised by any individual faculty member.

As of Fall of 2009, no member of the political science faculty may supervise more than six senior projects during any term. There are two reasons for this rule. First, if a member of the faculty supervises more than six, s/he might not be able to attend all of their students’ presentations. This happened in the Spring of 2009, and is a bad idea. Second, we want our faculty to be able to give enough attention to the projects they are advising. We will be asking the registrar to put caps on how many students can be registered for each of our faculty members’ versions of POSC 396, so that our professors cannot make exceptions.

No member of the faculty is required to supervise any particular topic or student. The whole idea is to find good matches among students, faculty, and topics. If a member of the faculty is uncomfortable with a topic, s/he should not feel obligated to supervise, even for a student s/he knows well. Similarly, if you have done work with some professor before that does not mean you should feel you need to work with them on your senior project. You should feel free to prospect.

Joe White
May 22, 2009