On Wednesday, April 28th, students of Professor Kathryn Ciancia’s History 680/690 senior thesis colloquium presented on their original undergraduate research in a live Zoom webinar to an audience of faculty, peers, family, and friends. To commemorate the experience, we asked the thesis students to record their answer to the question, “what have you enjoyed most about writing a senior thesis?”
Some talked about the writing process, some talked about the research process, the historiography, or their interaction with their thesis advisor. History major Julia Derzay says, “Oftentimes you’re going through a slog of class essays where you’re given a prompt and you just have to roll with whatever they tell you. But in a thesis you get to follow your own ideas, find your own sources and develop your own kind of niche. And while this is sort of cliché, researching for your thesis is kind of like being a detective and it’s most fun when you find something that you didn’t expect to come across or something you’ve never seen in research before.”