Senior Year Experience (SYE)
The Senior Year Experience (SYE) is a semester-long project chosen by the student to mark a culminating academic experience in the major. Students should propose an SYE project in an area in which they have significant experience as a result of classes, production work, and/or research. The SYE provides an opportunity to bring together the various skills students have been honing as majors.
Students should work with faculty mentors to establish a project with a clear scope and scale and write a proposal using the guidelines below. Students submit proposals roughly two weeks prior to finals week the semester before the semester of research. All SYEs require a public presentation (conference presentation, Festival of Scholarship and Creativity, etc.). Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major may submit for an honors project SYE. If approved for honors, students will be assigned two additional committee members. Honors projects require an oral defense at the end of the semester. All components of the SYE must be submitted via the webform link (in menu on left) by the Monday of the last week of classes. Projects working with human participants will require IRB approval.
The deadline for Spring 2025 project proposals is Monday, December 2nd.
Recent SYE projects include:
- Rhetorical analysis of supplement advertisements in male fitness magazines
- Fully-staged performance of a play focused on environmental issues
- One-act play culminating in a staged reading
- Queer textual/rhetorical analysis of contemporary music videos
- Persuasive strategies used by "pregnancy counseling" centers, based on undercover visit
- Creation of persuasive campaigns around cell phone use, single-use plastics, & vaping
- Audition portfolio and performance
- Interviews with women navigating experiences of sexism in corporate careers