Conference Ideas For an Honors Senior Seminar

Two Honors students, Nicole Alexander (1st yr.) and Mynul Khan (senior), traveled with the director, David Boyer, to the Upper Midwest Honors conference at Iowa State University in Ames, April 3-5. 2003.

One question we listened for at the conference: How to initiate and maintain a senior seminar without adding to graduation requirements. (In my mind it is not a done deal that we will do this. I still need to consult with students, faculty, and administration. I hope that includes lots of people reading this. Also, both concepts evolved once we got there and began listening to discussion among students and faculty from other programs.)

Faculty research with students: a model for our program?
Saturday after breakfast we were anxious to hear Mynul's presentation. (He had submitted a paper for the conference program and it got accepted.) Nicole and I kidded him that we were going to murmur, "Good point!" and "This is brilliant stuff!" at intervals. But seriously, it was a good, clear presentation, accessible for the newcomer and yet with enough technical depth to interest computer students. Imagine you are trying to program a computer to recognize words in human speech. The program has got to group some sounds together as similar, and separate others as dissimilar. Pretty formidable problem. But under that technical layer is a basic computational problem of how to most efficiently sift a data set into two piles based on any arbitrary sort of similarity. Unless you do it swiftly, the sheer sifting algorithm could take hours. Days. Centuries. You see the point. Mynul presented some research he'd done with Sarnath Ramnath, one of our CSCI faculty, in which algorithmic speed is obtained at the cost of massive scratch-work storage. But that seems a good tradeoff in today's computing world. Practical applications of similarity sorting are potentially immense, and are right-now technology.

Mynul’s experience presenting his paper

It was not the first time that I presented my research work out of my campus. It was fourth time that presented my research work in different environment other than my own school campus. Still I was little bit worried about my performance. I took 2 hours preparation the night before my presentation. I presented it in the following morning. I could not get into the technical aspect of my research because I knew that then I would lose all of my audience. Most of my presentation was based on general description of the problem. After presentation I found at least one person—professor Boyer who got interested in it. He asked me couple of questions. Well anyways, there is one point I want to make out of this conference which is based on my experience that I earned in my 4 years of school—honors program need to encourage students to get involve with a faculty with whom he/she will work on for his/her research. And probably at the end of his/her school year she will have her thesis paper ready to turn in. I think it will help a student to have research experience and also it will help him/her to get into a graduate school because of her/his good research background. Not only this; it will also help our university honors program to have more presenter who can go such a conference and represent our program such strong way that people will believe that SCSU honors program is based on intensive research work.

Nicole addresses the academic shape of our program

A senior seminar would be a good idea. It could be optional and the students could do their research either for their majors or on anything they like.

I have learned from quite a few people that the program should just offer the 300 level classes to juniors and seniors. This way the freshmen and sophomores aren’t rushing into something that is too difficult for them.

Back to David:

The faculty research mentoring relation that Mynul enjoyed from SCSU's Prof. Ramnath has a lot more in common than I saw at first with the potential for our Honors Program and the "car questions" we brought with us. Read on.

Ideas for an upper division Honors experience at SCSU based on mentored research

I've underlined the key idea in each section.

Around midmorning Friday, David and Nicole heard a session on exactly the sort of research mentoring that led Mynul Khan, one of the students from our school, to present a paper at the conference. At Iowa State, working on a faculty research project is required in second semester of their freshman year in honors. I don't think that would work for us. But as I listened to one of their research faculty describe his ongoing metallurgy lab work with honors students, and later as I spoke with their program director, I think I carried away some ideas we could use. Here they are:

(a) Would not have to occur in senior year. Could occur as soon as the student finds a faculty mentor, and whenever it fits the student's sequence of study. Could also count in a major, by departmental advisor's approval. Could result in a portfolio or other work to show grad schools and employers. Or it could just be an Honors Program elective in an area unrelated to the student's major, which might not even be determined yet.

(b) Needn't be scientific subject matter. Could be humanistic or creative as well, anything suitable for a senior thesis. We could impose a requirement of a major written component (hence "senior thesis") and a requirement to present whatever it turns out to be at that year's Honors Program student seminar. (That would make it a two-semester sequence with a continuing grade.) And/or contribute to SCSU's spring student research colloquium.

(c) Experiment at first with this as one option for elective credit in the program, with incentives for faculty to try it; discuss later whether to require it in the program. If we inaugurate it this next year, then my work as director will consist largely of sponsoring research relationships between students and faculty; about the time I retire in 2006, wiser heads will be able to use that accumulated experience to decide whether the senior seminar is working out well enough to become a program requirement. In the meantime, even as an elective, it could provide a lot of students, at their option, a meaningful upper-division experience in Honors.

(d) I'd like it to be inherently interdisciplinary, so as to retain some of the wide-scope focus of Honors toward the end of the student's career at our school; thus this is an all-university "capstone" idea. I can see ways of putting together faculty teams and providing faculty and departmental incentives to make cross-disciplinarity workable. Incentives could include start-up planning mini-grants, replacement of faculty time, and the chance eventually to coordinate a section of the seminar class of record one year.

(e) At the suggestion of Liz Beck, the honors director at our conference host, Iowa State, we could use a theme to tie the seminar together and provide interdisciplinary hooks for students' ideas. She suggested "ethics" as an ongoing seminar theme. But I want to stay away from themes that might seem like a department might own them. (Ethics: Philos.; public policy: Poli.Sci.) And I'd like to give the student some latitude. On the other hand, there are many themes that are suggestive of ethics and broad scope. "Dilemmas" is a pretty flexible theme. So are "perspectives" and "synergy."

(f) I have been assuming that the individual student's interest would drive the individual student's project, and that each student, aided by the faculty coordinator of one section of the seminar (i.e. by one of its instructors of record that year), would go find faculty expertise. But in fact, a lot of successful research mentoring at Iowa State takes place in lab settings well established by faculty, who simply recruit a crew of ISU honors students every year. A few of those students end up in that major, some end up in other science areas, and some just get a taste of lab technique and then go on to major in the humanities. It's not hard to generalize beyond the case of lab research: the broader idea is that one way to promote student work toward a senior seminar project is to promote student participation in current or ongoing faculty work. Mynul's paper is an example: Sarnath was working on similarity sorting, and recruited Mynul to implement and speed test his algorithmic modification.

(g) One aspect that attracted Mynul to the idea was the possibility that a senior could come away from the class with a portfolio of work to show employers and grad schools. Some departments at SCSU have longstanding experience coaching their seniors on constructing portfolios. It's an idea worth working on. This could end up meeting one of the felt needs for honors versions of the various majors, namely, to promote our best students for continued success after the bachelor's degree.