BA Capstone Planning
Your capstone experience is the culminating project you complete as you finish your degree in Sociology and Criminology and Justice Studies. You will choose between completing a Thesis, or an Internship project. Ideally this will be completed during your senior year.
Students who complete an Internship are expected to work for 90 hours in the community, hopefully for an agency or group whose work aligns with the student’s interests and goals. Students should ideally complete this experience during their senior year, though they will explore their interests and goals in both the SOC 382: Introduction to Social Research course, and the SOC 372: Proseminar course. Students who are interested in planning on an internship, especially if they are interested in completing the work over a summer, should be in contact with the Internship Coordinator in their sophomore or junior year.
For the Senior Thesis, students will choose between an empirical project, or completing an extended literature review, based on an area of interest chosen by the student. These interests are explored and proposals are developed in the SOC 382: Introduction to Social Research course, ideally completed during the student’s junior year. The thesis is completed during the student’s senior year. For students interested in conducting their own research, they will complete an empirical project (including 20 peer reviewed sources). Those who wish to perform in-depth analysis of existing research on a topic will complete an extended literature review (including 40 peer-reviewed sources).
In order to enroll in the course, send your CITI training certificate, annotated bibliography, and executive summary of your research proposal to the instructor scheduled to teach the class. If you're planning to take the course in the Spring semester, you must send these materials to the instructor no later than December 15 if you hope to receive a permission number prior to the start of the Spring semester (the deadline is May 15 for Fall semester enrollment). NOTE: You should have prepared all of these materials in SOC 382: Introduction to Social Research.
