University Honors

IR Honors Coordinator

Celeste Beesley, Political Science
celeste_beesley@byu.edu

If you are in the University Honors program, the IR Honors coordinator’s role is to help you successfully navigate the route to an excellent Honors thesis. The coordinator helps you identify possible advisors and referees and may even be able to help you brainstorm about thesis topics. The coordinator, along with your thesis advisor, guides you in writing a strong proposal to get your thesis off to a good start.

Other than the thesis, the Honors program office is the best source of advice about official Honors requirements and procedures.

For more information about completing an Honors thesis in IR, read this document.

Frequently Asked Questions About Honors Theses

What is Expected of an Honors thesis in IR?

An Honors thesis is a significant scholarly project at the undergraduate level. This means that your thesis will probably be the most sustained and involved research effort of your undergraduate career. There is no set length or content for your thesis: your thesis advisor will have the ultimate say about when your thesis is complete and ready to defend formally. As a rule of thumb, IR Honors theses tend to be about twice as long as a capstone research paper. The length and content of your thesis will also depend on the discipline within which you are working and on your chosen topic. For example, a thesis that requires the collection and statistical analysis of a large amount of data might have fewer pages of text than a qualitative historical or political study.

How Do I Choose an Advisor?

The best strategy is to take upper-division IR courses as soon as possible so you can get to know possible advisors and their areas of interest. A good thesis often builds on things that you learned about in an upper-division class. It is nearly impossible to write a strong thesis in an area where you have had no coursework. The IR Honors Coordinator can help you identify possible thesis advisors based on your interests.

Can I Do Part of My Honors Thesis as Capstone Paper?

Because the IR program already requires majors to complete a significant scholarly research project (i.e., Asian 495 or LatAm 495 or Mesa 495 or Poli 450 or Poli 470), it is often possible to combine a capstone paper with your Honors project. Completing your capstone paper might even help you accomplish as much as half the work necessary for your thesis. We generally encourage Honors students to try to combine these two significant projects, but you should be aware that this will not work in every case.

What is the Timeline for a Strong Thesis?

Strong Honors theses begin with good planning in your sophomore and junior years. You should already be thinking about your thesis topic and potential advisors by the beginning of your junior year, so that you can begin more specific coursework and planning before your senior year.

The IR program encourages you to submit your thesis proposal to the IR coordinator at least 9-11 months before your graduation (even though the Honors office has a later date). That earlier deadline allows you more time to finish a high-quality project and to make significant revisions as required by your thesis advisor and referee. The IR Honors coordinator will not sign off on a project that cannot be completed at a high level during the remaining time until graduation.

What is Expected of a Thesis Proposal?

The proposal is a statement summarizing the research you intend to do in your thesis. Think of it as a “beefed up” Poli 200 research design: general problem area, research question, hypotheses, literature review, data sources, case selection, research methods, tentative outline, preliminary bibliography. Before submitting your proposal for review, carefully plan your research procedure with the aid of your advisor and be sure to explicitly describe your research methods in the proposal. Be aware that the IR program takes the thesis proposal very seriously because we see it as the prerequisite to a strong thesis.