Thesis

The Honors Program is open to students finding their own unique pathway in satisfying this requirement, so please come and speak to the Honors Director about your ideas. The common expectation across all majors is that original research or creative activity will be completed in this undertaking.

This activity/effort should be the culmination of your academic career in the University Honors Program at UNO. It is your opportunity to bring together the separate strands of your education into a final product that demonstrates your accomplishment.

Study, investigate, and embrace an area that has always interested you: what do you want to explore? How do the theories you have worked with in your major(s) translate into the reality of an experiment? Your first step toward a thesis is thinking about a topic you wish to pursue.

Across the disciplines, there are different expectations for an Honors thesis, some of which are explored below. All efforts undertaken to satisfy this Honors requirement also have commonalities.

There are two principal ways to complete this requirement:

1. Students may enroll in HONR 4980: Thesis (which is what will appear on your transcript). There are prerequisites to getting the permission code for this course.
2. Students may use an existing discipline’s course at the 4000 level. You must have consulted with and received the Director’s permission prior to beginning the course and you must have submitted the required materials (see Thesis Guidelines below) outlining precisely what you are doing to extend the depth and breadth of your learning experience in the course and what will thus constitute your Honors capstone work.

For more details refer to the Thesis Guidelines. The first step is to email a no-more-than-two-single-spaced-page proposal to the Director, in which you outline what you propose to do (abstract), how you will undertake the effort (methodology), and propose a timeline for completion.

You may include a brief literature review and this written proposal should be reviewed by your faculty mentor and approved BEFORE it is sent to the Honors Director. The proposal is required before a permission number for the Honors 4980 course will be given; the proposal should be submitted with the mentor's approval (via a hard copy signature or an email cc) NO LATER THAN the end of the first week of classes in the semester in which the thesis/capstone will be undertaken.

To see past theses completed by our Honors graduates, please go to the Digital Commons webpage.