Our honors program is designed to provide an opportunity for especially motivated and qualified majors to conduct sustained, independent research on a topic of interest to them. To get honors you need to do some original and independent research and to complete an honors thesis reporting the research. The key here is "original and independent," but those words do not necessarily imply "theoretical" or "mathematical" or "econometric;" some of our most successful honors graduates have worked on case studies, historical analysis, economic philosophy, and the history of economic thought.

There are two routes to honors. One involves research beginning in October of the senior year and extending through the rest of the fall semester, Winter Study, and the spring semester. The other involves research over the entire senior year, and requires some initial student planning late in the junior year. Both require a substantial written thesis for successful completion.

Both require one additional course in the major, so that an honors major must complete at least ten courses in economics rather than nine. Your choice between the two routes will depend on a variety of factors, such as the nature of your faculty adviser's involvement and the time required to do research adequately on your topic; some projects, for example, may require an extensive period of data development, or extensive preliminary reading of unfamiliar literature, that makes the longer period advisable. The advantages and disadvantages of each route should become clearer below. (The first, shorter route is sometimes called, colloquially, the "mini-thesis route," but this is, frankly, a misnomer: the thesis in the shorter route must be a substantial written product.)

A. Shorter Route

In this route you will use the second half of Economics 401 to work on an honors proposal, under the guidance of a sponsoring faculty member. You will be excused from the normal work of Economics 401 in the last five weeks in order to work on the proposal (although you may find it valuable to audit 401 during the period). Your proposal is included as part of the basis for your grade in 401. The proposal must be a paper about 20 pages long which includes a clear statement of the goals of the research and a defense of the value of the research, a review of relevant literature, a statement of hypotheses you will test (if you are proposing empirical research) and a description of methods of testing, a discussion of available data (again, if relevant), and related topics.

An advantage of the shorter route is that at the time you begin work on the proposal, you need not have a concrete topic fully worked out. What you must demonstrate are interest and some background in a promising area of research, and that a faculty member is willing to work with you on the proposal. It clearly is highly advantageous for you to propose a topic for which one or more of your prior courses has prepared you. We encourage students who have at least a 3.5 GPA to apply for this route, but we will consider strong proposals from students with lower GPAs.

At the end of 401, the sponsoring faculty member and the coordinator of the honors program will read your proposal and will make a decision on whether to permit you to proceed with further research. They make the decision primarily on the potential for original research, as revealed by the proposal and your efforts during the period just ended. If the department does not permit you to proceed, or if you voluntarily abandon the pursuit of honors, then you'll receive credit for 401 and the process is ended.

Assuming you proceed, you then work independently with the sponsoring faculty member during Winter Study, and, if acceptable progress is made by the end of Winter Study, during the spring semester. You will enroll in Economics 30 in Winter Study and in Economics 404 during the spring; these courses do not meet regularly in the style of regular courses but all the students meet occasionally in a group and everyone makes periodic oral reports to the group. Economics 404 is the extra course required of honors majors; it may not substitute for any elective.

Safety Valves. Note that in this route you must show satisfactory progress at two specific points in time -- the end of Economics 401 and the end of Winter Study -- in order to continue. At either point, the department might not permit you to go on, or you may decide you don't want to continue. In that case, you'll receive credit for work already done -- either in the form of a grade on the proposal that enters into the Economics 401 grade or in the form of a passing grade in Winter Study. We have devised this honors program with the explicit goal of encouraging students to begin honors research even if they are somewhat uncertain whether they will continue on through the spring.

B. Longer Route

This route is open to students who are well qualified by preparation and interest to pursue a narrowly specialized topic for an entire year, and who have identified a promising topic by the end of the junior year.

If you want to start on this route, you must apply to the department by May 1 of your junior year, submitting a careful and detailed proposal for work under the supervision of a specified faculty member who has agreed to work with you. Thus this route requires you to identify and justify a topic much earlier than the shorter route does. Many department members typically require the proposal to fit more closely with their own research than they do for a shorter-route proposal. If we approve your application, then you will register for Economics 493 in the fall of the senior year, and that course may substitute for an elective (lower-level, middle-level, or advanced)--if you go on to complete the thesis, that is. If you make satisfactory progress in the fall, you'll go on to register in Economics 31 in Winter Study, and -- again assuming progress -- for Economics 494 in the spring. Economics 494 is the extra course required for honors and it may not substitute for an elective. In this route you are not excused from any part of 401.

In this route also you have safety valves. Even if you do not continue beyond the fall, or beyond Winter Study, you will receive credit for satisfactory work done up to that time, in the form of a grade for Economics 493 and Economics 31. However, if you drop out without completing Economics 494, then you cannot substitute Economics 493 for an elective in the major.

In both routes, the department makes a final determination of honors at the end of the spring semester, based on the written thesis and an oral defense before a department committee and other faculty and students -- this oral defense is an event open to the public. The honors coordinator will assist you in making effective oral presentations and in anticipating questions from faculty and students, and in fact will require you to make a "dry run" of an oral presentation before the actual defense. The honors coordinator takes the quality of your thesis and oral defense into account in determining your grade for Economics 404.

The department awards honors for an original and effective thesis, and highest honors for one that is unusually so in both respects.