Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Philosophy Senior Colloquium

By Amanda Holmes

For the past year or so, I have been working on my senior thesis. The project has taught me a lot about writing, research, patience and, surprisingly, friendship. These first three things were expected in taking on a year long research project but the last was a pleasant surprise. While I have been working on this project, I have been privileged to work alongside three other philosophy seniors who are working on theses of their own.

First semester of this year we would all meet once a week to go over our research and share drafts of our papers. This helped me to be a better writer as I learned to critique the other seniors’ work and responded to and learned from their criticisms of my own writing. It also helped learn to engage in peer review. The input of the other seniors was helpful in developing my thesis because I had to explain my project to other students who were not familiar with the material and research I was focusing on. We all benefitted from this in two ways. We had to learn to be clear in our writing and we learned a lot about topics we weren’t researching just by reading the other students’ papers.

Our weekly meetings also taught me the importance of having a good community of peers when doing heavy academic work. We were able to talk about our papers in an unintimidating environment and have honest conversations about the work we were doing and the things we were interested in. And throughout this process we all became pretty close.

Now the product of all this work is finally done. We have all turned in our final drafts of our senior theses. We will be presenting our work to each other, to our friends, and to our professors at 5 p.m on Tuesday, April 20 in the Loftus Conference Room in Rubloff Hall.

Amanda Holmes is a senior philosophy major from Atlanta, GA. She is vice president of the Philosophy Club. Consideration for the student bloggers is provided by Saint Xavier University.

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