and if you're
really unlucky, you'll wind up
on the wrong side of the curve.
I think some students actually go into negative probability.
I've had people come back who've been gone for ten years
and I just get an email out of the blue
"Can I finish my 
senior project with you?"
and
the faculty adviser that they had when
they were here before retired several years
ago.
Just
do it; start early and don't be
afraid of it.
And be proactive
and it can be a really good experience
I think I know everyone, but if you don't know me, I'm Matthew Moore, I teach political theory classes in the department.
I agree with
virtually everything that's been said, so I don't want to echo all of it.
one thing I tell all of my students
that I want all of you to know is that the project is both
easier and harder than you think
you really do already have the skills you need
to do a senior project.
There's nothing
that you don't know how to do
that's going to be required for doing
the senior project.  So it's easier in that sense and Chris' point about breaking it down into manageable steps is exactly right
and by the way
no problem
the
kinds of problems with that
you face in writing a senior project are exactly
the same kinds of problems that we face whenever we
write conference papers and journal articles.
it's not like it's something about you
or the stage of your education or about
particular difficulties of being an undergraduate
this is just the nature of the beast
I just gave a conference paper a couple of weeks
ago on Buddhism and politics.  It's an entirely new
area of research for me
I spent about nine months working on it;
I read about a hundred sources
and then I realized that almost half of them
were irrelevant.
That's totally standard issue
just doing a big research project and 
I guess that's part  of a bigger point, which is
you will have frustrations in the project
and that's not evidence that something is
going wrong
but when you say, I can't believe it and
like Julie said, write down everything you read. Half of it you're
going to end up
not using.
many people think, "Oh that's terrible, I wasted
all this time," but, you didn't actually.
you learned more about your topic and you
know more about what's relevant and what's
not and that's actually all part of the process
it's not evidence that something has
gone wrong.
so, some general points.
The project is harder than you think because
it takes longer than you think
and Alex I think is a great example.
His project
we've been talking about it for a little over a year
and it's gone from a very very vague question
to a more concrete
question and then after he started writing
it got even more concrete.
You know, it turned out after the first
the couple of sections got drafted he needed
to narrow it down again
that's one of the reasons I asked him to talk today since
he's been so successful about being able to
do that go back and back and back
and narrower and narrower and, OK now I get it
now I've go this clear question and it's really
nice to watch that.
If you only have ten weeks, especially if you
start and all you have is,
"I liked con-law"
and it's the first day of the quarter
not only do you not have time to do the work
you don't have time to think.
so that you're going to get to week six and you're going
to come up against some roadblock and instead
of that being an experience to learn something about
your topic it's going to be the cause of intense
panic
because you think, crap, I've only got three weeks 
but I've got to get done now, I don't have time to 
learn anything about this topic
and that's going to just be a huge bummer
for you, so
really
ten weeks is not enough
you've got to leave some more time for that but I think 
what Alex said was exactly right
the spring before, start talking to professors
you like and and maybe talk to three or
four professors and start narrowing it down
a little bit
Narrow it down and have some time over the summer
maybe read one book or two books over
the summer, actually will be enough to get
you moving
and then you can you can make a lot of progress
very quickly.
A couple
of things I want to echo that other people
said
about talking to professors at other schools.
I think Selina mentioned that.
I just supervised a senior project in the
fall and the student wrote to
five
of the most famous academics in America who deal
with this particular topic and five political activists
who deal
with the topics he's working on, and they all
wrote back.
Many of the wrote back like seven-page
e-mails
with "that's a really great idea and here's
the seven books you have to read, but don't
read this one because
it's crap and here are three issues
you haven't thought about and here's where you're
wrong about this point." It is incredibly helpful
and very very generous, so 
don't be afraid to do that and at the same
time
it turns out people actually really are
willing to help.
One of the experiences that I've had in supervising
projects is that the literature review
is the biggest problem for a lot of students
and what Julie said is exactly right, it it's not
a serial book report, right, it's not
this author said this and the way that
I suggest the students do it, and this is just
to give you an idea to think about as you move
forward in this process
is the first sentence of your literature 
review should be something like,
"there are seven major theories explaining
this phenomenon" and then you explain what
the various theories are.
A book report is "here's what makes this book
unique."
A literature review is,
"here's what here's what makes
these ideas unique,
and then here are the major books that explain them."
So the literature review is about ideas, it's
not about books,
it's not about articles or authors. They're
just examples of the bigger issue
which is this various series of ideas and that
turns out to be, I think, to be one of the hardest 
things people come up against.
I realized that many of you haven't done
a literature review by the time you start your
senior project and
that
can be intimidating.  It turns out again
to be easier than you think.
There's tons of resources
that are available for you to figure
out how to do it
and your advisor can help you go down that
path by saying, "here are three books you've
got to read"
and then that's going to help you move forward.
A couple more pieces and then I want to talk to you a little bit
about and specific projects in political
theory just to give an example of what kinds
of things those are.
Julie, I thought, was exactly right no matter
what
you read
you've go to keep track of it and Selina echoed
that your got to write just a little note down and
one of the reasons is
so you don't go back and read something irrelevant
twice.
Right, so if you're looking at fifty or sixty
sources
and you look at one the first week and say, 
this totally irrelevant, has a misleading title,
you throw it away and then, trust me,
three weeks later you're going to come across it
in someone's bibliography and you're going to go, 
or, that looks awsome I totally have to go look at that.
and you're going to read the damn thing again and you're
going to say, "wait a minute, I've read this before and
it was totally irrelevant." so you've got to keep track
even just to save yourself from wasted
work later, and similarly there's always going
to be some idea you think, oh I know I read
that somewhere, where was that? and it's really, really helpful.
and it doesn't need to be much 
and it can be just an index
card or couple of sentences that say, "this
talks about, 
you know, groups in Nepal"
OK I remember now, I can go back and find it.
You've got to keep track of that kind of stuff.
you should expect to write
and I guess this is how I do it, and I assume that
you guys must to be roughly similar. You should expect
to write two or maybe three drafts of your
paper
so typically the way I work with people is
that I get one draft
almost always the first draft I see isn't gradable
there is so much that needs work with it that
what I do is just give advice.
The second draft I offer a preliminary grade, 
and suggestions for 
what to improve and then the third draft is one that
actually gets graded.
So it may be that other people only do two
drafts but 
it's going to be more than one draft and 
is going to take you more than a week or so to make
the changes - it's another reason why you need a little
bit more time.
Just one quick comment about
different kinds of projects. Anika, I thought that
example was great about doing something that's
other than a paper.  I had a student who did a survey
last year or the year before - the students
organized the "get out the vote campaign" in SLO
which was great and very interesting and that
was a collective senior project
for several people.
so there really is a range of things that you
can do
just because of
what I work on, most of my senior projects are
papers
but they cover really broad range and so almost
anything you're interested in
could become a senior project.
I got a paper on whether the politics
of South Park are libertarian and
it actually was kind of an interesting topic and the stdent
spent a lot of time watching South Park
and then a lot of time reading political theory.
A student was interested in eugenics and
wrote a the paper about what current theories
are about eugenics and genetic manipulation
Students write about 
religion and public reason; about ethics
and individuality.  There's a whole series 
of possible topics. So almost anything you're
interested in could become a senior project
topic, but again, only if you had
some time in advance to narrow that down.
One last piece
Professor Arceneaux said that senior projects often
are helpful to you in later life.
It's true
but I think it's the kind of thing that people
are inclined not to believe
and so I just want to give you one quick example
of that.
I had a student who did a very good to project in the fall,
is applying to Ph.D. programs for next
year
One of the people that
he had written to during the process said,
"I want to see your senior project when it's done."
he sent it to them.  The person wrote back and said,
"this is such a good paper I think that this will
probably get into the
Ph.D. program you're interested in going to on its own.
This is such sophisticated work for an undergraduate
that this is going to get you what you want."
So there are true practical applications to this aside
from knowing how to do research
and being smarter
so there really are some life-long benefits  
to it
I think that's it, so I'll turn it back over
to Ron Den Otter
for the final comments.
