Please see the Guide to Independent Work for more information. The thesis is graded by the thesis advisor, who is the first reader of the senior thesis, and by a second reader assigned by the Undergraduate Program Office.
The grade is calculated as follows:. The Undergraduate Program office will determine any penalty for lateness, which will be included in the grade reported to the Registrar. A thesis that receives a grade of A or higher and a statement of support from both readers and is within the page limit may be considered for a Princeton School of Public and International Affairs thesis prize.
Prizes are awarded by a specially appointed School faculty committee that weighs the relative merits of all theses under consideration. Prizes are presented at the Class Day ceremony. Skip to content. Writing Advisor. The page limit includes: the abstract the table of contents ancillary material such as tables and charts all footnotes The page limit does not include: the title page the dedication the honor code statement the bibliography Include the Honor Pledge, and your signature on the last page.
Use a 1-inch margin on the left, right, top and bottom. Double-space all text except long quotations, footnotes and bibliography. Number your pages. The senior thesis is expected to make an original or otherwise distinctive contribution to broader knowledge in the field in which the student is working. It is important that the thesis be situated explicitly in relation to existing published literature. The senior thesis must be judged satisfactory by two members of the faculty, at least one of whom must be a member of the Department of Politics.
It is common, but by no means required, for junior paper topics, especially in the spring term, to serve as starting points for a senior thesis topic. Your senior thesis may expand upon ideas that you explored in the JP.
You may draw on and cite your own JP just like you would use other resources. In addition, you may re-use a limited portion of your JP in your senior thesis; for instance, the literature review could be re-used across the two. Whenever material from the JP is re-used, you must add a footnote noting the duplication across the JP or senior thesis.
Note this policy does not affect the standard university guidelines for attributing ideas and research findings, whenever appropriate. The same policy holds with respect to incorporating the Fall junior research prospectus into either the Spring JP or senior thesis. The Department encourages students to use the summer between junior and senior year for work on the senior thesis.
The length of a senior thesis is generally about double-spaced pages and rarely under 80 pages. No thesis should be longer than pages, including appendices. This limit does not include the ancillary pages for the title, dedication, table of contents, abstract, bibliography and honor code statement. Any pages after may or may not be read by the second reader. A thesis longer than pages will not be considered for Politics thesis prizes.
Also, seniors are required to prepare and present a professional poster describing their senior thesis results. Class of Senior Thesis Timeline. Such mechanical measures are helpful in bringing greater focus to a study, but in themselves they are never sufficient.
Not unlike fractals, history and human society can grow in complexity the more closely one looks. After all, books and studies are routinely written about individuals, i. To bring focus to a thesis, what is needed is a question. A good question will intrigue the reader, address an issue of importance, frame your study, and give it direction. Not least important, that question should excite you. It is the single most important factor in determining whether your experience of writing a thesis proves to be a stimulating, rewarding, and even, yes, a fun one, or instead an exercise in anxious drudgery.
When a question provokes you, research and writing can become a welcomed adventure as you work to satisfy your personal curiosity and then express your thoughts. When you are indifferent to your question, research and writing alike become chores.
Good, well-formulated questions lead to cogent and provocative theses, whereas bad, half-formed questions invariably lead to stale theses. Only you can know what truly fires your curiosity. Do not be shy in pursuing what intrigues you. Scholarship, of course, is a public endeavor, not a private indulgence. Thus, when formulating your question you will need to give some thought to motive, i. Motive explains what or how your research contributes to scholarship. Establishing motive should not be onerous or difficult, but it will require you to read carefully and engage with the scholarly literature on your topic.
Once you have done that, establishing motive is not difficult. All you need to do is to make clear to yourself and then the reader how your research relates to what has already been published.
Motive can take many different forms and combinations, including one, or more, of the below:. The key to making sure your final thesis has a good motive is to formulate a good research question. Your advisor can help you convert your enthusiasm for a topic into a proper research question. Do not expect, however, that your advisor will hand you a pre-formed research question. The more reading and thinking that you do, the easier you will find it to devise a suitable research question. The best research questions often come in the form of a puzzle.
Counter-intuitive observations are excellent leads to a good research question. When a given outcome or state of affairs defies our common expectation or the prediction of an accepted theory which are typically very much the same thing , this piques our curiosity. It provokes the question, why this and not that? Such puzzles are all around us. Scholars have established a close correlation between growth in per capita income levels and democratization, yet why is it that in the Arab world the wealthiest Arab societies are proving the most resistant to democratization?
The Iranian Revolution has been described by many as an emphatic rejection of Western modernity, yet then, one might ask, how does one explain that under the Islamic Revolutionary Regime the absolute and relative numbers of women receiving higher educations has increased dramatically since ?
In each case, one must move from a general topic—US-Saudi relations, democratization in the Arab world, the Iranian Revolution and its legacy—toward a question that might focus the thesis and guide the research and writing. As the three examples stand, they are each too expansive for a thesis. But they can each be narrowed. Thus, for our first example, one might concentrate on the writings of a single religious authority or declarations of a government ministry over a defined period of time, perhaps chosen to overlap with a key moment in US-Saudi relations e.
For the second, one might select a single country, such as Qatar. A critical step toward completing a thesis is putting together a prospectus. A prospectus lays out your research question, explains the motive, and points the research in the direction it will take in the months ahead with an outlined plan of research and writing. If that sounds like a lot to commit yourself to at the beginning of November, you can relax a little.
A prospectus is not a pledge breakable on pain of death. To the contrary, a prospectus is a preliminary map or plan laying out where you think you are, where you wish to go, and how you intend to get there—i.
Each of these components is distinct, but each is bound to the other. A change in one will necessitate a change in the others. Since it is possible, even probable, that the path your research and writing will take will deviate significantly from that laid out in the prospectus, it is important to think about the relationship between your research questions, your methods, and your collection of evidence early on, so that as you begin to revise one of these elements, you will also make any appropriate changes regarding the other elements.
The exercise of drafting a prospectus accomplishes this, and compels you to conceive of the thesis and its research and writing holistically.
By giving structure and direction to the process of research from the beginning, the prospectus can thereby save you a lot of grief. The result is to fritter away precious time going around in circles, piling up reading after reading but getting nowhere with the thesis.
Drafting a prospectus will help you identify sooner rather than later whether you have a properly framed research question, a compelling hypothesis, relevant and accessible evidence, and a feasible thesis. Novelty by itself, of course, does not make for good scholarship. The conclusions of our research must also be persuasive to others. A prospectus, therefore, should make a brief case for why the research is likely to prove convincing.
This part of the prospectus is, like the others, provisional. It can change. In the course of your research you may even find yourself turning one hundred eighty degrees against your original hypothesis. In order to turn against your own hypothesis, however, you must have first formulated that hypothesis. More often than we might expect, we initially arrive at our conclusions only vaguely aware of the reasoning that brought us from our premises to those conclusions.
And so to convince them, we must make our thinking explicit. A happy side effect of this is that this forces us to subject our own thinking to critical review and scrutinize it directly for flaws. Moreover, the more deeply we engage a topic, the more we assimilate knowledge and perspectives accessible only to other experts, and the less transparent our logic and thinking becomes to others.
Saying a few words in the prospectus about why someone should buy your argument can go a long way toward clarifying your thinking, and enable you to improve both your logic and the presentation of your argument.
Your prospectus should include a preliminary outline of the structure of the thesis. It should indicate the number of chapters the thesis will consist of, describe the contents of each chapter in a few sentences, and show how the chapters will hang together to present a coherent argument. Most theses will consist of three, perhaps four, chapters plus a short introduction and conclusion. A typical chapter would be around twenty pages in length.
You are always free to change the structure of the thesis if you wish later and as many times as you feel necessary. The point of producing an outline at this point is not to settle points of mechanics such as the number of chapters or determine a final table of contents but rather to prod you into thinking about the structure of your argument as a whole.
Finally, your prospectus should include a preliminary bibliography of books and articles. The list need not be extensive, just sufficiently long to demonstrate that you have identified a body of scholarship to which your research responds and accessible sources of evidence. In most cases, about ten books or articles should be sufficient. The extent of the final bibliography will depend on the nature of the thesis, but generally should be substantially larger.
NES is an interdisciplinary department defined by its subject matter. It therefore places no restrictions on the methods or mix of methods that you might use.
The question you pursue should determine your method. In some cases numerous methods might be applicable, although here, too, one should be wary of being too ambitious. You should seek guidance from your advisor on your methodology. Methods used in NES in recent years include historical process tracing, textual analysis and hermeneutics, comparative case studies, oral interviews, thick description, and basic quantitative analysis.
Balance is the key to research. You should expect to spend a considerable number of hours gathering, reading, analyzing, and poring over your sources. The conduct of original research is labor intensive. You certainly do not want to skimp on research. Cursory efforts to glean information from the surface reveal themselves even in good writing. At the same time, your time is limited, and you must guard against letting yourself get overwhelmed, lost, or seduced while conducting research.
Avoiding the third can be a challenge. Research for most scholars is comparatively painless, even fun. Students considering theses in playwriting or in other genres within the English Department must make a special application in the spring of junior year; instructions are to be found here.
Note that you do not need to submit an application in English to apply to write a thesis in the Program in Creative Writing. If your application to CWR is denied, contact the DUS in English; in such cases it is possible to revisit possibilities in the department even after the deadline has passed. Senior Thesis Dropbox Folder. Contact Us. Search form Search.
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