Doing the Honors: Designing a Curriculum for a Year-Long Thesis Project

Abstract

The personal librarian approach enables a deeper level of one-on-one contact with students beyond the typical reference interaction, and is often employed for student groups who may benefit from more targeted library services, such as student athletes, developmental education students, and international students. Honors students are another such cohort. The Honors Program at Berkeley College offers students the opportunity to participate with a group of their peers who are focused on pursuing a more academically rigorous path than what is ordinarily expected of undergraduate students. Students are admitted to the program either as freshmen or as continuing upperclassmen. Three components of the Honors Program are community service, advanced honors seminars (three courses taken during an academic year), and scholarship. Librarians support the third objective, which takes the form of a scholarly research paper on a topic of each student’s choice, written during the upper-level seminars and typically twenty to fifty pages in length.