<p>OP, what field/type of field is your son in?</p>
<p>I am with SLACFac. If there is to be a thesis option, I don’t think that “make it worth my while or hit the road” is the way faculty should treat students at an LAC.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with CRD. I don’t believe most professors work 80-90 per week. I know plenty of professors, many have their favorite hobbies (owning a vineyard, work in finance part time, photography). I also think it is the school/department’s responsibility to make sure there are professors who can advise senior thesis if it is an option for seniors. There may be in need of monetary incentive for those professors to do it, but it is not the student’s responsibility to figure it out. Your student may have selected the school because of the senior thesis option, so the school needs to live up to it. </p>
<p>I would go see the department head. Let her know he has been turned down by all the professors he has contacted. Asked her what should be his next step? Maybe she needs to do it herself or assign it to someone within her department. She is the boss, let her do her job. Sheesh. Continue to push up the food chain until he gets what he needs. This would not have been acceptable to me. I would just make sure he has met all of his deadlines in doing a senior thesis. Way to make future alumnus not wanting to donate money later.</p>
<p>I’m a prof and often “I don’t have time to supervise your thesis” is what we are told to say because we’re not actually allowed to say:
-I don’t think you have what it takes to write a thesis, since you’ve never met a deadline in my class and you always ask for an extension and believe that the rules don’t apply to you.
-You don’t take criticism well (or at all) and therefore you represent the advisee from hell
-You are extremely wedded to your own opinions and are not open-minded enough to do good research.
-Your politics offend me
and so forth.</p>
<p>You need to at least consider (along with your son) the possibility that “I don’t have time” is actually code for something else. Has your son struggled to meet deadlines? Does he frequently ask for special treatment or refuse to take criticism? Is he a strong writer and researcher? Is he teachable?</p>
<p>At this point, I’d recommend that your son go to a professor and very bluntly ask this question: I notice that many professors have stated that they don’t have time to mentor me. Could you perhaps provide me with some more feedback – is there something in particular that makes me seem like writing a thesis would be problematic for me?
Then you can work with a professor to map out a strategy to adjust any perceived deficiencies and perhaps convince him or her that the thesis should be an option.</p>
<p>Despite the fact that I think that a department has certain obligations if it puts out a thesis option, Momzie is definitely right: some students are a nightmare to work with. (In very extreme cases faculty feel threatened or “creeped out” by a student and turn him or her down for that reason as well.) I have used the “I don’t have time” excuse to turn down independent studies with students I don’t know terribly well who fall into categories #1 and #2 on her list. (However, if it is a student I know well, I will be very blunt about why I refuse to take him or her on as an independent study)</p>
<p>After reading the OP’s update about the timeline it seems strange that the advisor would say to work on it over the summer and then come back to get it approved in the fall, and then change her mind.</p>
<p>Maybe there is some misunderstanding based on email communication-- I would still suggest he meet with her in person as soon as he gets to campus.</p>
<p>to vballmom,</p>
<p>I don’t know much about LAC, but I know how Profs are working.</p>
<p>Imagine, that some student-volunteer approaches YOU in your office. He has an idea of a project. Great, but you don’t have time, you have your own projects and your own deadlines. He is a great guy, but … you strongly advice him to approach someone else.</p>
<p>Next, imagine a different scenario. A student-volunteer comes to you, tells you that he researched your projects, tells you that he is impressed and enthusiastic and asks you whether he can participate in your project. Bingo. Everyone loves volunteers.</p>
<p>Your son is not in the position to be a lab leader. If he wants to do something meaningful, he should join an existing project, in the capacity that would be assigned by the Prof. BTW, he may be asked to wash dishes during the first week.</p>
<p>to vballmom,</p>
<p>I know that sometimes students resent mundane work, because they want to collect data for their project, rather than wash dishes for someone else’s project. In my experience, if student joins an existing project, and does something useful for it (even washing dishes), his senior colleague would share data with him. If student becomes a useful member of the lab, the lab would help him with his individual project. It’s really about teamwork.</p>
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<p>It’s a social science. His research is more qualitative than quantitative, which is part of the problem in finding an advisor as most are more expert with quantitative research.</p>
<p>As I wrote earlier, my son has been continuing an email conversation with his faculty advisor who is also the chair of the department. She wrote him yesterday saying that she’d spoken to prof #4, who I mentioned in my first couple of posts as being a senior professor and also Assistant (not Associate, I got the title wrong) Dean of the college. My son took a course from prof #4 his freshman year. She gave prof #4 a heads up that my son wanted to do a senior project, and suggested to my son that he talk to him when he gets back on campus. She implied that he might agree to be his advisor for this project. I think my son is going to email him ahead of time and set up a time to meet.</p>
<p>If prof #4 turns him down, I’ll suggest to my son that he meet with his faculty advisor and see if there are other issues at play here. He will also consider joining the research of prof #2 + the prof in the other dept if they can use him in some capacity.</p>
<p>My thinking is that here’s a kid who is engaged his studies, is one of only a very few who has the motivation to do the work for a senior project in this department, has shown he can work independently in the past, gets good grades, meets deadlines, and has successfully balanced a very time-consuming sport with his academics for 3 years. Why not encourage additional academic passion?</p>
<p>/end mom rant ;)</p>
<p>to vballmom,</p>
<p>I never worked in LAC, so I don’t know the dynamics. </p>
<p>In a big university, students approach labs very early, not in the senior year. For grad school, I was choosing a supervisor, not the college, not the project, just the supervisor. </p>
<p>Who is working in the area that is interesting for your son? Nationally, not in your LAC. Who is the big name, with publications and track record? I’ll strongly suggest writing to this person. If he agrees to supervise your son, than ask LAC to help with accommodations (it is possible to arrange transfers).</p>
<p>Don’t try to interest Profs in your project. Try to find Prof. who is already working in this project and, then, join him.</p>
<p>You can’t push Prof. to supervise a project, that he (personally) is not exited about. It won’t be a happy marriage.</p>
<p>“My thinking is that here’s a kid who is engaged his studies, is one of only a very few who has the motivation to do the work for a senior project in this department, has shown he can work independently in the past, gets good grades, meets deadlines, and has successfully balanced a very time-consuming sport with his academics for 3 years. Why not encourage additional academic passion?”</p>
<p>May be you are lucky. May be I am unlucky. I never was in a situation, when college worried about my problems and my development. I think it is up to your S to become proactive, instead of waiting for college Profs to accommodate him. </p>
<p>Again, in my experience, you can’t push Prof. to work on someone else’s project. He can do it, but it won’t be a happy marriage.</p>
<p>californiaaa, with all due respect, since you are not a LAC faculty member, I would step back from this a little bit. Most LACs market themselves to students with promises of being concerned precisely about their issues and their development and, assuming that the OPs child is not one of the horror stories that Momzie posted about earlier, I think that the OP has grounds to be concerned, confused, etc. I also think it would be a rare LAC indeed that did not expect its professors to step up in a situation like this. Assuming that everything that vballmom has said in this thread is true, I think that the department needs to figure something out, and quickly.</p>
<p>This is probably because I work in the humanities, in an area where collaboration is virtually non-existent, but if I refused to work with students who weren’t interested in my preferred content and my preferred methods, I would barely work with any students at all, and that’s not acceptable at the undergraduate level.</p>
<p>californiaaa thanks for your thoughts. I guess I was just ranting because I actually went to a top LAC that encouraged students to follow their academic passions. I didn’t do a senior thesis but I took a course “with honors” which involved an additional research project. The professor worked with me to refine the topic and then set me loose to do the research. This kind of independent study was encouraged back then, but perhaps that’s a difference between a top LAC and the rest.</p>
<p>Anyway, there are lessons to be learned in this situation regardless of how it all plays out, and I appreciate everyone’s comments on this thread.</p>
<p>vballmom: I think it is kind of strange that a student interested in research would not already have spent time prior to senior year working with at least one faculty member on his or her existing research projects. Perhaps the faculty at your son’s school approach this situation with that question in mind.</p>
<p>I don’t mean this as criticism - it sounds like your son has been plenty busy - but everyone I know with research ambitions would already have quite a bit of experience before approaching faculty with an individual proposal.</p>
<p>Just my experience.</p>
<p>SLACFac , thanks</p>
<p>You are right. I am more familiar with big STEM labs, where many people are working on the same project.</p>
<p>I think the key to the student’s inability to find a faculty advisor is in the description that the research is qualitative when the faculty members are doing quantitative work. </p>
<p>Sometimes students have very interesting ideas, but unless they are measurable in some way, it can turn into a huge time sink with absolutely no conclusion. Alternatively, it could be that the suggested project is vague or amorphous, which is why the faculty advisor asked the student to try and refine his ideas over the summer. Perhaps if the student asked the potential faculty advisors how to narrow the focus of the research to get solid usable data, there might be more success with finding someone to help with a more defined project.</p>
<p>No problem, californiaaa. You’re absolutely right that in the big STEM lab environment at an R1 the onus is on the undergraduate to take the initiative and show how she or he can contribute to ongoing work. </p>
<p>And noimagination, at my institution most of the lab students start doing research before the senior year, but in a discipline like mine it wouldn’t be strange at all for a student to generate an idea or project while in an upper-level class taken in the junior year and then turn that into a larger individual project during the senior year.</p>
<p>It’s NOT a lab.<br>
It’s Social Sciences. And, since the dept has a senior thesis option, they, uh, have it. No one will transfer, for this. NOT all schools require advance ok. My kid got final approvals by mid-Oct of senior year, my D2 is a rising senior and set to finalize in September.</p>
<p>In SS, it’s not always necessary for a prof to agree with the premise. it is important that the prof feels qualified to judge the quality of the work and the breadth of approaches to a sub-topic.</p>
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<p>Yes, my son realizes that this might be an issue. Prof #4 has some background in finding ways to quantify data that is otherwise qualitative, which is one of the reasons I suggested that my son contact him. If he’s told that he can only do a quantitative research project then he’ll have to rethink his plan.</p>
<p>My son is hoping for the best as he had a good relationship with prof #4 his freshman year. He’ll know more in a couple of weeks when he’s back at school.</p>
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<p>Oldfort,</p>
<p>This statement along with your comment about alums being sore enough not to donate because they were turned down for senior thesis advising illustrates the ignorance among some here of how academia works in this area with the exception of schools like Reed where the senior thesis is a mandatory graduation requirement for all undergrads.</p>
<p>With exception of schools like Reed, the senior thesis option is a selective one where meeting minimum overall/major GPA requirements is the bare minimum. One must also have a thesis topic/proposal which an advisor is willing to advise on and approved by the department within the allotted timeframe. </p>
<p>If any of those isn’t met…student doesn’t get to do the thesis regardless of how much he/she may want it. Unless it’s a school like Reed, not every student who wants to is approved to do a thesis. </p>
<p>To take an analogy from the professional world not every entry-level employee hired by a given firm will make it to middle/senior management of a company or a partner in an ibanking/biglaw firm. </p>
<p>In practice, whether one can do a senior thesis at many colleges or not operates on similar principles. </p>
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<p>Exactly.</p>