<p>My son is a senior at a small LAC. He wants to graduate with honors and to do so he’ll need to do a yearlong research project this year. He has a topic that he’s very interested in researching, and has spent the summer thinking about the details and doing a preliminary literature search. He’s reached out to three faculty members in his department whose work is most related to what he wants to research, including his faculty adviser. All have said they’re too busy to be his senior project adviser. It’s a small department, only nine faculty members in total. The other 6 professors are unlikely to be willing to help as his project is fairly far outside of their areas of research.</p>
<p>My son doesn’t know any other student who is doing a senior project; most seniors take a 2-credit special topic rather than the 4-credit/2-semester honors project. </p>
<p>I’ve suggested to my son that he talk to one of the other senior faculty members in his department to get advice on how best to fulfill the requirements for the senior project. What other advice should I give him?</p>
<p>Other than doing what you’ve suggested, I’d also suggest reaching out to the department chair and academic dean for ideas on how to complete his honors project. </p>
<p>Out of curiosity, how well is he doing in his courses/regarded among the Professors in his department…especially the senior ones?</p>
<p>Instead of choosing his own topic and finding a sponsor, he might have better luck by asking the faculty whether he can work on some aspect of their ongoing research. Training someone for lab work ( if it’s a scientific project) is extraordinarily time consuming, but much more efficient if the project is streamlined with existing efforts. Most of the faculty I know at small LACs do the bulk of their research during the summer, as the rest of the year is spent teaching.</p>
<p>His current adviser is the department chair. The senior faculty member I suggested that my son talk to is also the Associate Dean. If he gets nowhere with him, I’ll suggest he talk to the Interim Dean of the college.</p>
<p>My son is on track to graduate cum laude. I think he’s well-regarded among the professors he’s taken courses from, but it’s hard to tell from a distance. He’s a fairly quiet student and doesn’t draw attention to himself, which might be working against him. I’ve read a couple of his emails to the 3 professors and I thought they were well thought through.</p>
<p>One of the 3 professors who turned him down is doing research in a very similar area jointly with a professor in another department. Co-incidentally, my son is taking a course this semester from this other professor to fulfill a distribution requirement. I suggested he try to recruit the other prof to be on his senior project committee, but he still needs someone from his department to advise. I can see how changing his approach from “I want to study X, will you help?” to “I see you’re studying X, can I help?” would be a good idea. He might have to give up the application of X to the specific population that he’s interested in, however, which would be disappointing to him.</p>
<p>This isn’t a lab project, if that matters. My son has a professional in the field who’s willing to help him, an alumna of his college.</p>
<p>If the department is full of classmates who are more gregarious “go-getter” types when it comes to lobbying for their senior projects, this could be a problem. </p>
<p>However, it’s usually a minor one which could be solved unless the Profs genuinely are at/beyond capacity to advise him or in a more unfortunate case, they perceive him as someone who isn’t worth going out of their way for whatever reason…whether the issue is academic<em>, social skills/graces related, being unlucky in internal departmental politics</em>*, etc. </p>
<p>*I.e. Differences/conflicts over topic/subfield, research methodology, theories to be used, viewpoints, etc.</p>
<p>** While I never experienced this in my department(s) at my LAC, my friends/relatives have experienced this in spades at various research universities for undergrad and especially grad school. One uncle dropped out of a PhD program at an elite public university in the early '70s because his department was so polarized between two groups of senior faculty that the department’s atmosphere became too toxic for him to remain.</p>
<p>How involved does a professor have to be in the yearlong project? If the professor just needs to sign off paperwork, teach the student certain programs or research methods, and have progress meetings with the student, there are many professors, maybe even some outside of the department, who can be the professor of record for your son’s research project. If anything, they can encourage the professors who declined to change their minds and get them to help with your son’s research project.</p>
<p>How frustrating. This seems unacceptable. I don’t know if it is protocol for your son to come up with the project first or come up with the adviser first. I’d think he would float some trial balloons with profs he wanted to work with first. I’d say he needs another meeting with the Dean/adviser to declare firmly his wish to take the seniior project route and talk about how he exactly might be able to do so. I don’t think he should get too hung up on what the project exactly is in the end. Just that it fulfills the academic requirements for graduating with honors. Working on any extended project/research will give him good experience. As said above, joining a professors research is common.</p>
<p>This may be a tricky situation, to have an adviser forced to supervise him, esp by the Dean of the College. I’d try again with the dept Dean before that.</p>
<p>More than one of my professor friends have told me that to be successful in academia, you have to be ruthless with your time. Many people don’t understand that. </p>
<p>Have your son approach the professors that work in the related area and ask them how he can ** contribute ** to ** their ** research as a senior project. That approach is more likely to bear fruit.</p>
<p>And totally ditch the idea of overruling the professors. That is the worst idea. These people have zero obligation to supervise your son’s work. Zero.</p>
<p>Your son has already done some work on this project, however prelminary, and I think he has a right to do a project on a topic of his own choosing. I happen to know that for Harvard undergrad theses, much work is done the summer before senior year and the idea of changing topic, or the idea of changing a topic to be more helpful to a professor, would be unheard of. </p>
<p>I would have thought,though, that the matter of advisor might have been settled.</p>
<p>I would think that any professor in the department could be an advisor. It wouldn’t have to be one of those three whose interests match the project. A professor who has expertise in the general subject area and in research methods could advise: they certainly won’t be writing it.</p>
<p>I could be wrong, but I would encourage your son to keep asking other professors in the department.</p>
<p>I cannot believe that there could possible be a problem for a student wanting to take on advanced work, and a visit to a higher up would be very appropriate if there isn’t a single professor willing to advise. We all know that research can take precedence over teaching but this is ridiculous.</p>
<p>The visit to higher up can be in a positive spirit: not as a complaint, but the implicit complaint will be effective anyway.</p>
<p>You certainly couldn’t expect a Harvard professor to indulge a project of no interest to them. The summer work usually takes place after discussion with the supervising professor. </p>
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<p>You are wrong. You simply don’t understand what a professor’s obligations are in this area. There is no obligation to expend an iota of your precious time on some student project that doesn’t interest you. Pushing further will only aggravate more people.</p>
<p>Doubt you’ll see this statement in any printed college materials. Nor will you get anyone associated with the college to state this to a parent/student out loud. If they did, they would be risking a reduction in yield and overall revenue stream. </p>
<p>Rather, the message conveyed is something like we will nurture your child’s dream and encourage them to explore and grow on sun dappled lawns with smiley, approachable professors.</p>
<p>So in that respect there is some hypocrisy here.</p>
<p>Frankly, I think it’s a shame that after spending $300,000+ this self-directed, curious student is not getting more attention from the LAC.</p>
<p>I can only speak for my Harvard senior thesis. I came up with the idea spring junior year because I needed to get a grant to fund it. I think I probably got the okay from my advisers then. That said, it never occurred to me that anyone in the department would refuse to be an adviser. However we were a small department and a thesis of some sort was required. I don’t believe my project (a survey of low cost housing built in London, Paris and Berlin before and after WW2 was going to help their research any). Personally I’d be pretty upset if I couldn’t find an adviser. </p>
<p>I would encourage him to ask the department head for suggestions. He might suggest either professors who would be interested in working with your son, or ways to tweak the project.</p>
<p>That’s kind of sad to say, that at an LAC in particular, there is zero responsibility. LACs often promote themselves as alternatives to unis because they focus on the educational development of their students. There are even LACs where teaching performance is part of the tenure evaluation. Why are these people teaching at LACs if they do not want to be involved in education? I can see a particular prof not being able to do this, but as a culture there should be more than a zero obligation.</p>
<p>People go into academia for a variety of reasons. It’s a very hard job to get, with a success rate about the same as musical theater. People aren’t retiring. Junior professors typically work 80-90 hours per week trying to get tenure. More senior professors worked 80-90 hours to week to get where they are and nobody is going to tell them how to spend their time. </p>
<p>Professors love working with and mentoring undergraduate students, especially at liberal arts colleges. Many enjoy teaching and do so enthusiastically. What they may not want to do is to supervise a project that doesn’t interest them. It really crosses the line and their time is really precious. They don’t have to do this. They’ve earned the right not to have to. In order to get where they are they have to be experienced at saying no.</p>
<p>The student needs to negotiate with a professor to find a project that they want to supervise. That’s a fact of life.</p>
<p>Does he have an academic advisor who knows him and the school well?</p>
<p>I would advise my kid to go to their advisor with the situation and ask for suggestions. Perhaps they will know the right professor in the math or chem dept with time and inclination to supervise just this project. Or they will advise your son to work with the physics dept to get a project that he can be happy with done. A good advisor will be interested in helping their advisee and have the right experience/expertise.</p>
<p>If they offer the thesis option for honors, it IS part of departmental practice. This isn’t some random idea. Run it up the ladder. Your son will have to be determined.</p>
<p>My kid’s primary advisor was on sabbatical, another had to step into the role. This one disagreed with the premise of the research/thesis. But my kid was able to proceed.</p>
<p>I started working in a lab in my department spring of my junior year, and continued working through the summer and during my senior year. I knew what data was being collected from that project, so when it was time to develop a topic for my senior thesis, I picked one that could use that data. My topic was pretty tangential to the project as a whole - I never would have thought to approach that lab with that topic if I hadn’t already been an insider and known what data they had. My thesis advisor was my lab supervisor, who was a post-doc, not a professor, and technically associated with an entirely different department.</p>
<p>The kids who were thesis-track and didn’t already have a relationship with an advisor had a much tougher time. My suggestion would be to find a project he can contribute to and fit his topic to some subset of that project.</p>
<p>ClassicRockerDad, I have no doubt what you say is true. Not sure from your posts, however, if you are happy with this state of affairs.</p>
<p>If the professors are too busy to help the kids, then that seriously undermines a fundamental justification for liberal arts education, IMO. Online education would be just as effective and a lot cheaper, no?</p>
<p>Usually professors will get some kind of course credit for supervising and undergraduate thesis, so it may not be true that they all have zero interest. It may be that the prof’s he’s talked to have all the senior projects they can handle. </p>
<p>It’s hard to believe that the topic is so specialized that only a few profs in the department could handle it. I’d run it buy the other profs. They may be willing despite not being directly related to their research interests.</p>
<p>If it’s a small department, the professors might honestly and sincerely not have time.</p>
<p>My D took the approach of asking the professor most involved in her area of interest last year if she could assist with anything he was working on. He made her his TA this year (which he never does for undergrads) and is supervising her senior thesis, which is based upon a book he is currently writing. The man is a bold-faced name in the field (maybe THE bold-faced name) and D just wanted the opportunity to work with him. Her thesis isn’t exactly what she would have chosen, but she figures she can do that in grad school and right now it was more important to earn her chops and get the chance to learn from such a great scholar in the field. I can’t tell you how much she has learned and how generous he has been to her. Subject matter at this point is much less important to her than the skills she is learning and the contacts she is making. His name on her resume and her name in his writing is like hitting the lottery.</p>