Doing Independent Work at Wellesley

In honor of finally finishing my darn thesis, I want to talk about doing independent work at Wellesley. Wellesley’s got a lot of options for doing independent work. By independent work, I mean projects that students pursue outside of a normal class, usually under the supervision of a professor to some degree. I personally think it’s a great option at Wellesley, and I’d highly recommend it to incoming students!

It’s a pretty flexible process. You can do an independent study, a thesis, a summer research project, and more. There’s a lot of variation in time commitment, effort, professor supervision, expectations, and so on. They’re not all geared toward publishing fancy research papers either. It’s not just for STEM people! A lot of places focus on big science-oriented research projects, but you can thesis in any major at Wellesley. I’m doing my thesis in the English Department.

In fact, the topics are pretty much endless. I have one friend who’s studying tsunamis and another who’s writing a novel in Spanish. Another friend is researching the history of the representation of science and scientists in Hollywood. If you’re interested in a topic, you can find a professor who is interested as well.

One thing that I especially like is that there’s a good chance that Wellesley will fund you. (I talked about that more in an old blog post!) About half the people who applied for thesis funding got a fellowship. There are a lot of external funding sources that Wellesley can steer you toward.

I just turned in my honors thesis. (It’s not a very photogenic process, so I just included a leftover picture from spring break!) I picked a creative writing project, putting together a collection of speculative short fiction. I started last spring semester (which is absolutely not required), doing an independent creative writing study while abroad. I found I really liked magical realism, so I started writing stories mostly in that genre. I applied toward the end of last spring and got my topic accepted. I think almost everyone does, or is steered toward another way of exploring their topic. I was assigned a faculty adviser (in most departments you pick and reach out to possible advisers yourself, I think, but Creative Writing does it differently) and we met once a week throughout the year. I tried to write or do a lot of revision each week.

I kept a few of the stories I had written last spring and wrote a lot of new stories over the course of the fall. I ended up with ten stories, just over 100 pages long. I submitted everything yesterday morning.  I’m not quite finished the whole process, though. I picked out four faculty members to be thesis reviewers, and in two weeks, I’m going to have to defend my thesis to them. Thankfully, professors aren’t known to be really aggressive or anything. My adviser described it as more of a conversation, which is a relief. My friends who did more traditional research theses are going over their research, but I’m not really sure how to prepare–reread the stories? Think about them? I’m sure it will turn out okay, though.

So that’s what doing independent work at Wellesley is like! I felt like I was working pretty independently while also being supported by my adviser. It’s been hard but fulfilling, and I recommend doing it in some form to any Wellesley student.

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