What is a Thesis/Creative Project?

The thesis/creative project is the culminating honors capstone experience required of every student graduating from Barrett. It is an exercise of much greater depth and scope than a research paper. It is an opportunity to contribute and advance scholarship in your discipline and it is designed to be appropriate to that discipline so it exhibits a variety of forms: design projects, lab experiments, and creative projects. It allows you to integrate your entire honors experience and develop confidence in demonstrating meaningful expertise in your field. Barrett students with a genuine interest or passion for their thesis topic and genuine understanding of the thesis process are much more likely to have a rewarding capstone experience. Remember that your honors thesis may be written outside of your major. For example, the thesis of a Pre-Med major might be in Chemistry or Biology. Your thesis director must be a regular full-time member of the Arizona State faculty.

Thesis: The honors thesis reports, in the accepted style of its subject matter, the results of research activity, whether it is meditative, experimental, archival, exploratory, or aesthetically creative. The report presents and evaluates the activity on which it is based. It should be the culmination of the student’s undergraduate education. An honors thesis normally receives three-to-six semester hour credit, often in two parts: honors directed study (492) and thesis (493). This division is arbitrary and is not meant to impose explicit structure on research and writing. Students who write theses may alternate between research and writing or may conduct research into the second semester. While there are core guidelines, honors theses are different in every department and for every topic. Lengths vary widely. Theses with significant amounts of tabulated or formulaic data may be quite short, while literature-based theses may be longer. The two courses (XXX492 and XXX493) count as courses for upper division honors credit. XXX493 or its equivalent is required for all students graduating from Barrett. The thesis process concludes with an oral defense at which the student presents the motivation leading to the work, the work and its methodology, and its results, including discussion of the importance of the thesis to the student.

Creative Project: The honors creative project is appropriate for many students in engineering, computer programming, and architecture, the visual and performing arts and communication. Some students in those colleges may prefer writing a traditional thesis; students in other colleges may opt for a creative project. A creative project must be documented by both expository text and appropriate evidence of the work submitted (slides, audio and/or videotape, etc.) The text should describe the process involved in the work’s production and, as appropriate, offer an analysis of or commentary on that work. This writing assumes the function of an exhibition catalogue, narrative program, or comparable supporting document and will be evaluated as an integral part of the project; it is required to meet the University’s L (Literacy) requirement. Engineering and Architecture students may wish to complete their thesis/creative project in conjunction with the departmental capstone requirement. The decision for creative project or thesis rests with the individual department and, particularly, the director and student in consultation with each other.