Senior IS: Getting Ready

A Message for Juniors Looking Forward to Senior I.S.:

Many of you are thinking about what you will do next year for your Senior Independent Study. Let us offer some unsolicited advice.

First the practical. There will be a meeting of all Junior and Senior History majors the first week of classes. We will ask you to tell us what you will do and what faculty members you would like to work with for your Senior I.S. From this information we will designate Senior I.S. advisors so that you can begin individual meetings by week two of the semester

Senior I.S. can be very stressful. Looking forward now, in May, you can be excused for thinking that it is a long time away. But - be forewarned - it's easy to arrive in August without a clear idea of what you are doing, to dig around in the library for a few weeks, playing with topic ideas. Next thing you know it's December and you're struggling to finish the two chapters required of History 451. Next thing you know it's Spring Break and you are breaking out in hives because you still have the bulk of your I.S. to write. Think of this now, for a moment: The I.S. due date (the Monday after Spring Break, in late March) comes earlier in the year than you would expect. You have a semester and a half to complete your Senior I.S. and that is not as much time as you think.

So... what might you do about that now? Let me tell you the easy answer: Nothing! This is the last summer before you have to get a job and support yourself. Enjoy! You're probably twenty-one now. You can finally spend as much time in the bar as you would like. Educate yourself: learn the difference between a blended Scotch and a single malt. Read those last couple Stephen King novels you missed. Catch up on twenty years of ESPN Classic. Heck, you can finally make up for all that TV you missed while studying for College. There's plenty of time to worry about school tomorrow...

There's another answer: you could make your Senior year more successful, more enjoyable, and much easier by using some of this summer to think about what you want to do, and more importantly, using some of your time to do some background work for your topic. This can make the difference between passing and not passing, between a satisfactory I.S. and an Honors, between a painful spring of 2004 and an enjoyable one.

Whatever you do, you'd really like to return to Wooster at the end of the summer with the beginnings of a workable topic. Let me say a few words more to help you think about how to get there.

Take some time to imagine all kinds of different topics, even if there's one you've been thinking about since Junior High.

Ask yourself first:
- what kinds of topics interest you? Think back over your courses. What's left a lasting impression? - what models of historical scholarship would you like to follow? What are some of the secondary sources, articles and books by historians, that you enjoyed in your classes?

Then ask:
- how might you turn a general interest into a workable I.S. topic? What kinds of secondary sources and primary sources would you use? - what would be the focus of your study? - how would you limit your topic? How would you break it down to make it manageable? - what would be the most useful books to read in preparation for this topic?

Sometimes students think they need a BIG topic for their Senior I.S. To write 70-120 pages it's gotta be big, right? Nope. More often than not, students need to focus their interests on something much smaller than what they first begin with.

Here's an example. Let's say you come to me saying you'd like to study American society during World War II. That's a fine ambition. And there are plenty of books out there that you could read (the SECONDARY LITERATURE on your topic). But what are you going to DO? You need to be able to make this topic yours. You need to identify a HISTORICAL PROBLEM and some PRIMARY SOURCES to build a successful research project. To do so, you need an angle. For example, you might ask what College of Wooster students were doing during the war. You might ask how the war changed their experience of college. These are good questions. Together, they form an interesting historical problem. How to go about answering them? Well, you need sources. You could go to the College library, to Special Collections, and see what kinds of archival sources we might have that would bear on your topic: newspapers, personal papers left to the college, yearbooks. (Time may be running out, but you might be able to design a series of oral history interviews with senior citizens who attended the school in the 1940s). If you get this far, you've done the hardest part of your I.S. You have a rough HISTORICAL PROBLEM, you've begun to survey the SECONDARY LITERATURE, and you have PRIMARY SOURCES on your topic. Bravo. Now you just need a few months of notetaking, developing an argument, outlining, and writing to get to the finished product. Believe me, that's the easy part.

If you think you know your general topic, take some time to look for PRIMARY SOURCES (or to imagine what these might be). These could include: a grandparent's diary, oral history interviews, government documents, books, novels, memoirs, newspapers, films...or the many documents available in Ohio archives. (You can play around searching for many of these in CONSORT, ARCHIVES USA or WORLDCAT, available on the library's web pages).

If you think you know the PRIMARY SOURCES for your topic, find two or three of the most important SECONDARY WORKS. Read these over the summer and think about how you might approach the topic.

If you have no idea what you want to do, spend some time reading about anything that interests you, in both PRIMARY SOURCES and SECONDARY SOURCES.

You will never go wrong doing a little background reading on the period or place that interests you.

If you have five topics that you simply love, recognize that you only have time to do one. Don't let the availability of options be an excuse for doing nothing.

I have been talking about a traditional work of historical research. You can also ponder some alternative models for your Senior I.S. I could imagine some very successful alternate IS topics where you:

- Develop a curriculum on a particular topic for high school history teachers - Develop a computer game or a board game - Create an elaborate web site - Catalogue documents from the Wooster Historical Society - Prepare a historical guide to some aspect of Wooster history - Prepare an edited edition of a diary - Produce a historical documentary - Write a historical novel

To do such an IS you would have to explain why this is the right model for you. You would have to have the right skills. And you would have to agree, with your advisor, on the appropriate criteria for evaluation.

Good luck with your thinking. And have a great summer!
THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY