Honours Thesis

The honours program

At Dalhousie, the Psychology & Neuroscience honours programs are administered centrally by the department, though a two semester honours course. Honours students usually have to complete specific courses (e.g. Psychology or Neuroscience Stats; two honours seminars) as part of their final year. Throughout the year, you will spend time working with your supervisor to administer a study. Most honours students usually contribute to an ongoing project that is being run by one of the senior lab members.

Finding a supervisor and setting expectations

Before you are eligible to apply to the honours program, a faculty supervisor must agree to supervise you. Once they agree and your honours program begins, be sure to set expectations together and plan out the project. The honours project is a lot work, and much of the work starts early on in the honours process. Honours students do a lot of the data collection for the projects, and contribute directly to advancing the work of the lab. At the end of the process, you will have produced a document which would ideally contribute directly to a publication.

A proposal that is a lot more than a proposal

The first major milestone is the "honours proposal". The proposal is in scary quotes because it isn't really a proposal but a first draft of most of the thesis sections.

My the second week of December you will be expected to produce a document with the following:

• Introduction (including literature review; ~12 pages, double spaced)

• Methodology/Methods (~5 pages)

• Expected results (~3 pages)

• References (~ 4 pages)

The document will be assessed by the various criteria provided in your honours course. The purpose of this document is to give you a solid foundation and detailed feedback as you pursue the final part of the project.

The final draft

In the second semester, once the data has been collected and finalized, your project will come to some degree of completion. While most honours projects include a complete dataset for publication, it is not unusual for projects to finish with an incomplete dataset. Nonetheless, you are expected to have collected enough data for your supervise to analyze your scientific reasoning.

Your final thesis draft should incorporate the feedback from the proposal plus the following:

• Expected actual results (~3-5 pages)

• Discussion (~5 pages)

• Conclusion (~1 page)

The document should tell the story of your study as if it were a scientific article. When complete, it will be assessed for grades. Though the honours publications are not published publicly, honours students are often acknowledged through authorship or co-authorship on papers produced from their work.