Those students before you who have participated in the Honors Program have created fascinating and useful Honors projects and theses.
There are two ways in which you can examine those projects and theses.
Honors Projects @ RIC
All Honors projects are catalogued and are represented by records in the HELIN Catalog.
Do a TITLE search using the phrase “Rhode Island College undergraduate honors project” to retrieve records for projects in all fields. You can also add to this phrase the name of a particular department or program, i.e. “in Chemistry” or “in Mathematics” to see only those projects submitted to those departments. All Honors projects for which a duplicate circulating copy was submitted to the library are shelved on Level 2 in the Thesis Collection with call numbers that have the prefix “Honors.”
Recent Honors projects have been submitted in digital form in addition to submission on paper. Those digital copies are stored as pdf files in our institutional repository called Digital Commons and can be viewed online at any time.
Rhode Island College is not the only institution at which undergraduates work on Honors projects. In addition to examining the projects of former RIC students, you might consider examining topics and types of projects pursued by undergraduates at other colleges and universities for ideas.
Most institutions cannot (or choose not to) give you complete access to their Honors projects remotely, but you can often read the titles online along with an abstract of the project.
For example, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has an Honors Program and this link, http://www.unc.edu/depts/honors/thesis_view.shtml allows you to search Honors papers from 2003 to more recent years by department and keyword in title/abstract. East Tennessee State University, on the other hand, provides long narrative descriptions of the projects undertaken and the student-researcher’s path to completion [ http://www.etsu.edu/honors/research/students/spotlight.asp].
Honors papers at other institutions can be discovered via the Advanced Search page in Google using this strategy:
Find web pages that have…one or more of these words:
“undergraduate research” OR “honors thesis” OR “honors project”
Search within a site or domain: EDU
Many peer-reviewed journals and other publication outlets now exist to publish the work of undergraduate researchers. You too might become a published author in an academic journal.
The Undergraduate Journals and Conferences Directory maintained at Mercyhurst College, will allow you to examine the website of a number of venues which focus on publishing the work of undergraduates. Faculty with whom you will work will also be able to recommend publications and conferences in their specific fields which allow submissions by undergraduate researchers.
Do not hesitate to contact me about anything noted in this very brief overview, or about library resources, or about discovering and using academic information in general.
Patricia B.M. Brennan, Associate Professor / Head of Reference, Adams 204, 456-2810, pbrennan@ric.edu
