You can view your current department/major thesis requirements here. A form for updating the department/major thesis requirements will become available in Spring 2025. In the meanwhile, if you would like to make changes to your current thesis requirements, please email thesis@honors.utah.edu.

In the first few weeks of each semester, the Honors College emails the DHL on record a list of their Honors students. If you have questions about your current Honors students, please email us at thesis@honors.utah.edu.

Learn more about how coursework in the major supports Honors students here.

You can use your curriculum to help move students through a thesis. Here are some ideas:

Directly thesis-focused courses. All departments have a thesis course (4999). Students typically register for  this class during the term when they plan to complete their thesis. Often, this class does not have formal meeting times or locations. Giving the class a formal meeting time or location can save you alot of time and can help students connect to one another during the thesis process.

Some departments have a 'pre-thesis' course - often 4998 - taught by the DHL and involving a specific time/location. This allows the DHL to meet with students in a group rather than 1-on-1, provide some assistance with thesis projects earlier in the process, allows for peer review and consultation, and peer guidance, and provides an opportunity to facilitate UROP funding proposals and poster or other presentation requirements.

It also gives you awareness of issues in student progress, and time to intervene. While doing this depends on department or college level needs or resources, it can be of great utility in increasing successful thesis and degree completion.

Marshalling Other Coursework. Beyond thesis related courses, your program may have a project course or seminar that could help get students on track for thesis completion.

If your department has many honors students, you can route all the honors students into a single section of such a course, and use the course to put them on track.

If you have relatively few honors students, instructors for a class can verbally or even on the syllabus encourage such students to talk to their DHL, and/or to use the class to help build a thesis project. In Psychology, the research methods course is an ideal point for students to at least begin exploring the thesis area. In English, seminar courses afford the option of exploring possible thesis topics.

We only have a few students?! Consider college-level courses to accomplish the same goals that are achieved by individual departments. A college-wide thesis course that has defined meeting times, for example, could allow DHLs across different departments with smaller numbers of students to capitalize on efficiencies of group meetings, cohort building and bonding, and peer review and mentoring.

Yes! As a DHL, one of your central jobs is to connect Honors students in your program with potential faculty advisors.

Sometimes this works smoothly and with little effort on your part. You reach out to a junior in the spring-semester, and find out that she has been working in a laboratory for one year, has a good relationship with the PI of that laboratory, and an initial plan for a thesis project.  Or you touch base in fall with a senior, and he reports that he has already been in conversation with a faculty mentor about turning a choreography project into a thesis in time for the spring semester deadlines. YAHOO!

Other times, students need your help. Some example situations?

Students have time to succeed, but only a vague and ill-formed idea or almost no idea at all, and no plan. The first step here - does this student truly want to complete the thesis? If so, you could help the student focus their thinking in a direction you can match with a proven thesis advisor. Why a proven advisor? Students like this may need a bit more hand-holding, especially as they begin their projects, and proven advisors can call on more experiences to help these students. You could also connect the student to one or two proven advisors who can get them to a manageable project without your involvement.

Students have a clear and viable idea that doesn't fit with anyone in your department. This might be a reason to expand your mentor pool by partnering with someone outside your unit.  Often, DHLs know of a viable mentor outside their unit already, and you can also call on Associate Deans Pasupathi and Parker for more assistance. The University offers a "find-a-researcher" tool that can be a starting point for helping the student search. Then, help the student to craft a brief paragraph description of their idea, and a formal and respectful email to the prospective mentor from the student (though cc'ing you, ideally). Your role is to help the student identify potential mentors, but they should take responsibility for reaching out to the person.

Your can also nudge the student's idea towards something that can be mentored from the usual pool of DHLs. Remind students that their thesis project is a project, not a lifetime commitment, and doing a project that is 'next to' rather than directly within their interests isn't the end of their research dreams.

Students have no adequate idea or plan and very limited time. When this happens, one option is to simply say no. No student is guaranteed the degree, and students who arrive at the close of their undergraduate career having ignored the need to prepare for the thesis may need to let go of the goal.

Depending on your program and the student's unique situation, you may choose to try to accommodate the student by finding a mentor and helping shape a project -  but feasibility and timing need to be front and center. These accommodations work best when students are highly committed, and the project is building on existing work they or their advisor have already completed (i.e., no new data collection or new creative project to be done), or is a more literature-review paper type of project in a well-defined area (note that not all programs allow this latter type of thesis).

Finally, a last set of situations involves serious issues between the student and a mentor that are compromising the likelihood of success. We address this topic in more detail here. However, if this arises early enough, helping the student to switch projects and advisors is worth trying. Doing so will be more successful if whatever aspects of the problem were within the students' control are openly considered and discussed.

Building cohorts of students promotes thesis completion because

• it showcases the possibility of successful thesis work
• provides peer mentoring
• allows you to be more efficient in working with students because you can provide the right information and support at the right time.

To build a cohort, contact early career students in your department to introduce yourself and provide a sense of the path for the thesis. This can be more efficiently done with group events, but departments do it both individually and in groups.

The vast majority of student-advisor relationships proceed reasonably well and result in successful theses, proud mentors, and happy graduating Honors students.

However, when things go awry, you may be the first person to whom students or faculty advisors come with difficulties.

If you are comfortable mediating a conversation, feel free to do so. It is often helpful to have initial one-on-one conversations to help both parties explore what the problem is, what their ideal solution looks like, and what kind of openness they have to other possibilities, before bringing the parties together. It is critical to follow up on any conversation with an emailed recap of the content of the conversation and any agreements that were made.

If you are not comfortable with mediation or have a conflict of interest, your department may have some kind of committee/ombudsperson who can serve in this role. For example, in the Psychology department, there is a Director of Undergraduate studies who can function as an ombudsman, and there is a Professional Issues and Ethics committee (PIE) that is charged with helping to mediate conflicts. For issues arising from the student side, department advisors and Honors program managers can be helpful - and are experienced in having difficult conversations with students. For issues arising from the faculty side, the chair of your unit may be an important resource.

In our experience, many of the more garden variety difficulties, such as an advisor having less time than the student needs, can be addressed relatively straightforwardly. Adding a co-advisor who can help fill the gaps, or having the student and advisor simply work out a clearer sense of what their mutual responsibilities and plans will be, often suffice. If the issues arise early in the process, it may be useful to explore an advisor change, or rethink the scope of the project with an eye to feasibility/advisor burden.

Other serious issues, such as sexual harrassment or discrimination, must be reported. For sexual misconduct, you must report the incident to the Title IX Coordinator/OEO office (801-581-8365; oeo@utah.edu).

Student misconduct can be reported to the Dean of Students office.  Student academic misconduct, such as plagiarism, can be reported to the Dean of Faculty office (scroll down for student related resources).

Serious student-related misconduct may be grounds for denying the student the possibility of completing the Honors degree; it's worth having at least a working departmental policy about this type of issue. Serious faculty-related misconduct is out of the scope of the Honors College's authority, but in such a case, we urge you to work with us to help protect the students' opportunity to complete the degree in some way, if that is what the student wishes to do.