Honors Project Information
The Honors projects are at the heart of your Honors program academic experience. These are opportunities to work one-on-one with faculty members in areas of your interest and can take almost any form. We have had students pursue a wide variety of projects, including contributing to faculty research agendas, developing independent research projects, building pedagogical tools for classroom experience, and producing works of art. We encourage you to discuss project ideas with faculty in your fields of interest.
Individual instructors and Honors Program students will work together to develop learning objectives, learning activities, and means of evaluation for the project.
As a rule of thumb, this might serve as a guide:
- Add-on Projects should challenge the student to develop an in-depth understanding of subject matters of the course beyond the usual content of the course.
- Add-on Projects should incorporatee a range of high-quality, credible, relevant sources that are appropriate for the discipline and genre to develop project ideas, rather than relying solely on discipline textbooks.
- Add-on Projects should provide opportunities for students to develop discipline appropriate skills for documenting information gathered for developing the topic, resulting in a written demonstration of acquired knowledge that uses discipline appropriate documentation format (i.e., APA, MLA, etc.). This may be a reflection paper, journal, or formal research paper, as appropriate.
- Add-on projects should challenge students to develop and apply critical thinking skills. It should provide opportunities for students to think, read, write, create and present using a wide range of strategies and levels of complexity.
- Add-on projects should provide opportunities for both EXPERIENCE and REFLECTION. Experience refers to active learning, problem-based learning, team-based learning, and may include field trips, site visits, experiments, simulations, debates and other co-curricular activities. Reflection refers to student engagement in various levels of thinking not only about the topic/subject of the project, but also in "thinking about thinking" and understanding the nature of learning.
We have also encouraged faculty to list existing research projects that they are interested in having Honors students plug into. If any of these existing projects are of interest to you, please contact us at honors@tamut.edu.
Examples of Ongoing Projects
Sustainability and English Studies
- Overview- The idea 'sustainability' questions how humanity balances economic, ecological, and social goals. This project interrogates ways that sustainability can inform the research and teaching of English.
- Supervisor- Dr. Joseph Burzynski (English)
Constitutional Law and Theory Project
- Overview- Researching and writing on constitutional law topics
- Supervisor- Dr. Gary Bugh (Political Science)
Computational studies of organic/biological molecules
- Overview- It is a computer based project- handling of chemicals is not necessary. Students will gain the basic knowledge of computational chemistry which is used in drug design.
- Supervisor- Dr. Md Kalam (Chemistry)
Oral History
- Overview- An opportunity to develop the tools of doing oral history while contributing to our understanding of the Ark-La-Tex region.
- Supervisor- Dr. Tom Wagy (History)
New virus discovery and annotation
- Overview - This project is about finding new viruses in online sequence databases that other scientists didn't notice. You will follow a procedure to search for viruses, and then we will do a bioinformatics analysis to learn more about the new viruses you found.
- Supervisor - Dr. Benjamin Neuman (Biology)
Reconstructing Carboniferous fossil ecosystems
- Overview-This project deals with fossils - we will collect new specimens and work from old but unidentified specimens in the TAMUT teaching collection and try to identify a group of fossils. In some cases you may end up describing new species by pointing out differences from the other species around at that time. With this information we can begin to reconstruct an ancient Texan ecosystem from the time before the Dinosaurs. Topics include brachiopods, corals, sponges, mollusks and bryozoa.
- Supervisor- Dr. Benjamin Neuman (Biology)