As the fall term dawns on us, seniors are entering their final year on campus as members of the Class of 2025. During their time at Dartmouth, they’ve taken seminars, labs and lectures, exploring Dartmouth through a multitude of departments. Beyond the classroom, they’ve completed sophomore summer, enjoyed off-terms and traveled abroad. So what does their last year look like? In many cases, seniors choose to showcase their academic growth by devoting their last year to completing a thesis — a culminating experience tailored to their major.
According to government professor and thesis advisor Jeffrey Friedman, a senior thesis marks a student’s evolution from a pupil in the classroom to a contributor of original academic thought.
To get a better understanding of thesis-writing, I sat down with the individuals responsible for shepherding generations of students through the process: thesis advisors themselves.
Thesis advisors can be any professor within the student’s chosen department. Once a department approves a senior’s proposal, students begin writing during the summer before their senior year, and many enroll in an honors thesis class for the fall term, which serves as a block for research and writing. While thesis advisors help their advisees stay on track outside of class, it is ultimately the student who makes novel contributions to their culminating project.
Seniors selecting their thesis topic — as well as their advisor — tend to pull from past classroom experiences. For many students, thesis topics originate from a class they took with their professor-turned-advisor.
According to Friedman, some of his advisees’ topics have come from his own government seminar classes, which he sees as “most conducive to building close relationships with students.”
“You get to know students’ views and attitudes more than in a lecture-based class, and seminars typically require students to produce more in-depth research in their papers,” Friedman said. “[This often leads] directly to thesis topics, but in general [provides] a clearer sense of the fit between students’ interests and professors’ research approaches.”
After finalizing a topic, the thesis research and writing process carries its own responsibilities. According to English and creative writing professor Carolyn Dever, students are often excited — and intimidated — to get started.
“What [senior thesis classes] tend to do … is help students come together and understand the [scope] of the thesis project,” she said. “The job of the thesis advisor … is to help the student figure out those first steps and all the steps that follow.”
Dever explained that students are largely responsible for setting their own deadlines. The advisor’s job is to hold them accountable and guide seniors to their best work.
“You have to write so much, and somehow it has to fit together and make an original contribution,” Dever said. “My strategy as an advisor is always to help students understand that they already have the skills that they need to accomplish a thesis, they just need to rethink them.”
While Dever advises students working on English theses that aim to answer complex literary questions, Friedman’s government advisees “start by identifying a puzzle.” Often, this means understanding why political behavior varies under different contexts, which becomes the starting point for a thesis investigation.
“Students will then evaluate that theory,” Friedman continued. “Some use historical evidence and case studies. Others use different forms of quantitative data, statistics and experiments.”
Though theses in the humanities tend to incorporate qualitative evidence and theory, theses in the math department use entirely different metrics, even as the end result — an exhaustive research paper — remains the same.
Math professor Rosa Orellana advises honors theses that “have done something new or look at something in a new way.” She recently counseled on a thesis that “arose from map coloring,” the process by which colors are assigned differently depending on borders.
“The results are relatively strong, so we decided to write them up in an article, and we submitted it to a journal,” Orellana said. “It’s in the [publishing] process right now.”
Dever added that students’ academic passions — which may eventually form the basis of their thesis — often crystallize during their sophomore year, “when students’ interests and specific research questions begin to come into focus.”
“Sometimes I’ll work with students who do a Presidential Fellowship with me and use that as a transition point into a thesis,” she said. “Other times, it will be an extension of a paper or project that a student’s done in class, or some sort of really interesting question that students come to that they want to keep drilling down on.”
Orellana added that the analysis methods taught in some math classes guide students to their research topic.
“Most of them have started in MATH 28 [“Introduction to Combinatorics”] … which is the Combinatorics course,” she said. “The way that I have been teaching it is through guided discovery, so it teaches you the research process.”
In addition, Orellana has been approached by a number of students, who she has never taught before and instead read about her area of study — algebraic combinatorics — on the math department web page before asking her to advise them.
Regardless of whether the professor has a past relationship with the student, thesis advisors are able to supervise their advisees’ development over the course of the program, according to Dever.
“For a professor, it’s a chance to really get to know a student … what are the habits of their mind?” Dever said “What is their writing process? How do you help one student as opposed to another?”
Dever added that the most rewarding and thrilling part of the process is “the pride of accomplishment when it all works out.”
For Orellana, the best moment as an advisor is when students discover things that contradict their prior beliefs.
“When you get to be that critical is when you have grown as a mathematician, and you know you’re not blinded by wanting to get a [specific] result,” Orellana said.
Similarly, Friedman enjoys watching students “chart their own path in some novel domain of research.”
“Students often feel quite disappointed when they refute their ideas,” Friedman said. “One lesson that I make sure to tell all my thesis advisees is to make sure [that] when they start their project, that they [should] be just as comfortable with the data not supporting their hypothesis as they would be if the data did.”
According to Dever, the true driver of a thesis project is pure curiosity and wanting to add a novel contribution to the academic world.
“The most successful theses are the ones that authentically represent a student’s serious interests and not what might seem impressive, flashy or exciting to the outside world,” Dever said. “In your nerdiest of nerdy selves, what is the thing that you really want to spend a year thinking about?”
