Senior Project Proposal
Please attach a description of the proposed senior project.
1. Description of the project: The description should be approximately three double spaced pages and should (a) describe the project, its expected output, and its scholarly or artistic aim(s), and (b) explain how you expect to successfully complete the project. While you must address all the questions below, you need not do it in any particular order.
(A) State clearly the proposed research question or artistic aim(s) of the project. What is the contribution you hope to make? Describe your project’s relationship to your ongoing work or area of concentration. You must also clearly specify the expected output (e.g., a research paper, design project, or artistic project) and discuss the specific methods with which you will complete your project.
(B) It is especially crucial that your proposal explicitly explain your preparation to carry out your project. First, because a Senior Project is only one semester long, it is not the time for learning new skills, but for practicing, implementing, and honing the skills you already have. What skills and methods do you require to complete the project, and where did you acquire them? For instance, if your project is archival, explain how you developed your archival skills; if it requires a certain artistic technique, state where you learned it; if it involves statistical analysis, say where you learned your statistical methods. Second, beyond methods, skills, and techniques, what intellectual or theoretical background does the project require and how did you develop this background? Describe both in paragraph form and in the annotated bibliography below the intellectual context of your project and where and when you did this preparatory work. Show us what’s in the current scholarly literature or artistic field and what’s absent and place your proposed project in respect to those presence and absences. Third, your proposal should show how you intend to complete your project in a semester. With your faculty mentor, create a list of milestones you will need to pass in order to complete your project, and include that list in your proposal together with estimated dates for when you will hit each one.
2. Annotated Bibliography or Relevant Works: The bibliography should situate a student’s project within a body of work in their field. This should include 8-12 books, articles, key documents, films, plays, catalogs, etc. Please provide the full citation and a short description of the relevance of each text or work to the proposed project.