Honors Program

The Honors Thesis Program offers qualified students an opportunity to conduct independent communication research and to write an honors thesis reporting their results. The program provides for close contact between students and thesis advisors so that students can receive intensive guidance and assistance throughout their research and writing. The aim is to help students go through the process of conceptualization, study planning, data collection, analysis and writing, which is essential to excellence in scholarship.

Honors Thesis Program Information and Application Form
Tips for Honors Students by Honors Students

Honors Students

Shawnee Baughman

Shawnee is working with Professor Jeremy Bailenson and Dr. Robin Rosenberg, who is the world’s expert on the psychology of superheros. They are using an innovative new Virtual World in which the user can fly like a superhero by raising and moving their arms. They will be studying some of the psychological effects that may ensue after one embodies a superhero. The goal is to see whether positive social actions, or helping behaviors, increase when they have been given the chance to act as a hero.

Advisor: Jeremy Bailenson

Sydney Burlison

The thesis is currently at an early stage of development and is to be completed spring of 2012. I will be looking at science fiction television and cinema, particularly the critically acclaimed re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica, in attempts to relate it back to our perception of science, technology, human relations and the “self.” Through a formal analysis and the process of conducting interviews, I will use production modes, screenwriting and character development to reinforce the notion that technology has and will continue to shape the way we live and perceive others and ourselves. The science fiction genre as a whole has expressed an anxiety over technology and how it could eventually render the human body obsolete. Alternate forms of the body are consistently present in science fiction texts, from the android, to the terminator, to the avatar and the cylon. I will use both scholarly text and visible, mainstream media to explore the developing relationship between the human body, different forms of technology, and our identity.

Advisor: Fred Turner

Alyssa Green

Psychologists have identified social relationships as integral to the process of facilitating learning. Computer mediated learning environments, specifically in this case multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), have become more socially intelligent but have issues in fostering and maintaining relatedness between learners. My honors thesis research will be a part of the research project began by Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford), Valdlen Koltun (Stanford), Hunter Gehlbach (Harvard) and Chris Dede (Harvard). It focuses on enhancing immersive social perspective taking and perceived virtual similarity to enable intelligent social relationships. The goal is to develop and study new approaches to facilitate interpersonal relationships in online learning environments because certain barriers can be overcome in these virtual worlds to let learners interact in innovative and effective ways.