Students who meet the criteria outlined in the ORC for Honors should first identify a faculty member who will supervise the thesis research and discuss the planned work with that faculty member. Having a specific research project in mind is often not necessary. In fact, for many faculty, the student may join an ongoing project rather than initiate one of her or his own. The student should first obtain and fill out the Neuroscience Honors Checklist form, have his faculty advisor sign the Checklist form, and then submit the completed and signed form to the departmental office to request approval from the Neuroscience Steering Committee.
The Thesis Committee must include a regular member of the Department. The other member, if not a regular member of the Department, must have an active academic appointment (e.g., Research Associate, Research Professor, Medical School Faculty, Faculty in other departments of the College, for instance.) Either committee member may serve as the primary advisor. The two members of the Thesis Committee may not both be in the same laboratory.
Students must enroll in Honors before the end of the Fall term of their senior year. To complete Honors, they must enroll in a minimum of 2 terms of Neuroscience Honors Research (PSYC 91). Students may take two or three terms of Honors Research, but no more than one term of 91 may count toward the major, and this term will fulfill the culminating experience. Additional terms of 91 can only count toward the 35 courses that are required for graduation. Psych 91 cannot be used as an elective course for the major.
Download and use the Checklist for Neuroscience Honors
The most important requirement is completion of an acceptable thesis based on at least two terms of laboratory or field research. The Honors thesis is expected to entail an independent and individual project, which must be read and approved by the Thesis Committee. The thesis is to follow APA style, in a form suitable for submission to an APA journal.
Honors students must present their research to department faculty and other interested parties during a symposium scheduled during latter part of the spring term of their senior year.
Midway through the Winter term preceding graduation, all Honors students must submit a Prospectus of their thesis, first to their advisor and then to the Undergraduate Committee. The prospectus should include a description of the rationale for the research, the methods used, analyses to be employed, and implications of the expected results. Members of the Neuroscience Steering Committee will review the prospectus and consult with the student and advisor if they have any concerns about the project.
The Thesis Committee will read and evaluate the written thesis and will then schedule an oral presentation or defense. The Thesis Committee then makes a recommendation to the Neuroscience Steering Committee regarding the awarding of Honors or High Honors. The Neuroscience Steering Committee will consider both this recommendation and grades in the major in making a recommendation to the department faculty.
Honors students are also eligible for several Department awards, which are voted on by faculty who attend the Honors presentations and/or the year-end faculty meeting.
Grades for PSYC 91 are awarded by the primary advisor. It is common for faculty advisors to find it difficult to evaluate the thesis work until it is complete, and thus it is acceptable to assign a grade of ON (On-going) for initial terms of PSYC 91. The "ON" grades must be changed to regular letter grades by the end of the Spring term, when the thesis is completed.
No. In Neuroscience, we require that all theses be based on some form of empirical work. This empirical work could take one of many different approaches (e.g., behavioral testing, anatomical or histological analysis, field observation), but our expectation is that the final product will represent new, original information.
Of course, virtually all studies are grounded in previous knowledge, so you will need to do a literature review to provide the background for your own studies.
Regular members of the faculty are those who hold the appointments of Professor, Associate Professor, or Assistant Professor (also sometimes referred to as tenured/tenure-track faculty). At least one person on your Thesis Committee must be from this group. Nonregular members of the faculty have titles that include terms like "adjunct," "visiting," "lecturer," and "research." These faculty members can certainly make important contributions to your thesis, including serving as either primary advisor or second reader, but the nature of their appointment does not allow them voting privileges.
There is no set length of a thesis in Neuroscience, because the types of studies done by our students can be very different from one another. For example, one thesis may require a lengthy description of complex methodology; another may have extensive statistical analyses; and yet another could be relatively straightforward in methods and results but produce unexpected findings requiring far-reaching discussion.
It would be worth your while to look over some past theses (available in both the department and the library) to get a sense of what successful theses look like. It can be very helpful to have a model of the type of thesis you are writing: (a) the publishable length paper followed by several appendices such as extended literature review and extended data analysis, or (b) the long, all-inclusive version. It is also be helpful to examine title pages, Tables of Contents, Prefaces, and Acknowledgments in completed theses from previous years. Your adviser or the departmental office will direct you towards these resources.
A related question is "how many experiments should my thesis have?" and the answer is, once again, that it depends on the topic. You should discuss with your advisor his or her expectations about what constitutes an acceptable body of work on that area.
That is all right! The point of an Honors thesis is to grapple with a question. If your hypothesis was reasonable and your methodology sound, then your results are what they are. Of course, you will want, in your discussion section, to consider the impact of any potential flaws in your methods and the possibility that alternative hypotheses would be more consistent with your findings.
Yes and no. You may certainly include data you gathered before enrolling in PSYC 91 in the thesis; however, it would usually be in the form of findings you cite in the Introduction or as a Preliminary Study. The thesis needs to have empirical work that was conducted during the terms of enrollment in PSYC 91. If you are going to be basing some of your thesis on previous work you did with your advisor, you should make clear in the Prospectus what portion of the work is new (i.e., part of the PSYC 91).
Start at the end (the date the final draft is due to the thesis committee) and plan backwards. You will want to give yourself time to write the Results and Discussion, so make sure your statistical analyses are done early enough to have time to think about what you have to say in those sections. If you have complex analyses, you will want to have all the data collected in time to do them. If your methods are difficult to learn or your subjects hard to get, you will want to put adequate time on your calendar for that. Do the literature review for your Introduction as early as you can and write up your Methods as you go along, so you don't have to rush to do these in the end (and don't risk forgetting important details).
The dates for completion of various requirements for Honors are detailed on the attached sheet. In consultation with your advisor, you should set realistic deadlines for intermediate steps to reaching completion of the project.
Begin by checking with the Dean of Faculty's office for undergraduate research. (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dof/undergrad/grants/index.html) Many of our honors students have also been funded through programs overseen by their residence halls and other organizations to which they belong. Finally, if you have not yet entered your senior year, consider applying for one of the Department's fellowships, the Benner and the Filene, which provide a stipend of a term of research, typically leading up to admission to the honors program.
When seeking funding, do not forget that you are likely to incur expenses for copying and binding the thesis and for producing the poster presentation. In recent years, these costs have been in the range of $50-100.
