We just told you how very accomplished, motivated, and talented the Honors students are as a group. Once they know where to go and what to do - many will exceed your wildest expectations. But, they need you to help them with where to go, and what to do.

Providing a clear path to the thesis

A clear path to the thesis outlines the steps students should take and the timing with which they should take them.

It is likely that this information exists for your unit informally - in the minds of faculty, staff, and students. That's a start, but it isn't always ideal.

For many units, the academic advisor who works most closely with your Honors students has provided this information in a quickly digestible format. For example, biomedical engineering, psychology, and other units provide documents for students to draw upon in planning.

This ideal set of steps and timing need not always limit other possibilities - whether it does so is up to your unit to determine. For example, some units require a full-year sequence of coursework associated with the thesis (e.g., Psychology, Marketing), and students who can't fulfill that coursework need to receive permission for an exception. For other units, the steps and timing are ideals, but students can deviate from those steps and timing and still be successful.

Communicating that clear path to students

Documents like the examples convey the "what" of your unit/department's thesis pathway. But, to whom and how?

To whom - Get Four Groups of People on the Same Page

a. Honors students early in their major

b. Faculty in your department/unit as well as other faculty who serve as thesis mentors

c. Advising staff within your department/unit

d. Honors College staff/administration.

When these four groups of people are aligned in their understandings, students have a consistent set of guidelines, and receive consistent support and encouragement from faculty, department/major advisors, and the Honors College.

How

For Honors College staff/administration, emailing documents is the ideal method of communication.

For your pool of faculty thesis mentors and your department staff, we rely on your judgment - some units work very well with emailed documents; in other units, it is better to take 5 minutes of a faculty or staff meeting to brief people.

For students, we strongly advise using emails as an official university communications tool (and we give you emails for all your unit's honors students at the beginning of each fall). However, we are actively looking at alternative messaging strategies in the era in which students prefer texting.