BIO A 466: Biocultural Anthropology Honors Thesis
In order to earn the distinction of College Honors, I needed to complete both the Honors core courses and departmental honors in one of my majors. I chose to complete Anthropology departmental honors because I wanted to try my hand at anthropology research and I hadn't yet designed my own project. The other less-glamorous reason was that I was intimidated by the project required to earn honors from the microbiology department. In an interesting turn of events, I ended up completing an almost identical project in microbiology anyway, but alas, doing more work than necessary is sometimes unavoidable.
This project took me a very long time to complete. I began the process in my junior year, taking the introductory research seminar with my fellow anthropology honors students. I found myself feeling a little bit like the odd duck out in the group because I was doing a biocultural project that relied on quantifiable data and statistics whereas most of my peers were working on cultural projects that relied on interviews and tons of high theory. I collected data throughout my senior year, gathering online dating profiles, crafting Catalyst surveys, begging my friends to help me with the objective ratings. Then my adviser and I tackled the statistical analysis, using a remote desktop connection to access STATA and run my linear regressions. After many struggles, I had presentable results to show at the Anthropology honors round table at the end of the year. However, since I was graduating a year later, I decided to take my time finishing up the actual paper. Bad idea. Of course, I ended up putting the paper on the back burner and not doing nearly any work on it for a year. When I picked it back up at the beginning of my final quarter, just weeks before it was due, I realized I had an extremely rough draft to work with and that the actual research felt distant. I felt guilty about neglecting the project, and about demanding so much patience from my saintly thesis adviser. I was worried that I wouldn't be proud of whatever product I would eventually produce. It was also a little embarrassing for me to look back at this paper, the majority of which was written at the end of my junior year. The paper I wrote for my microbiology thesis was WORLDS better and it was striking to realize how much I had improved as a writer since that first draft.
Below I have posted my first working draft of the completed paper, after I had picked it back up but before my adviser had added his revisions.
This project took me a very long time to complete. I began the process in my junior year, taking the introductory research seminar with my fellow anthropology honors students. I found myself feeling a little bit like the odd duck out in the group because I was doing a biocultural project that relied on quantifiable data and statistics whereas most of my peers were working on cultural projects that relied on interviews and tons of high theory. I collected data throughout my senior year, gathering online dating profiles, crafting Catalyst surveys, begging my friends to help me with the objective ratings. Then my adviser and I tackled the statistical analysis, using a remote desktop connection to access STATA and run my linear regressions. After many struggles, I had presentable results to show at the Anthropology honors round table at the end of the year. However, since I was graduating a year later, I decided to take my time finishing up the actual paper. Bad idea. Of course, I ended up putting the paper on the back burner and not doing nearly any work on it for a year. When I picked it back up at the beginning of my final quarter, just weeks before it was due, I realized I had an extremely rough draft to work with and that the actual research felt distant. I felt guilty about neglecting the project, and about demanding so much patience from my saintly thesis adviser. I was worried that I wouldn't be proud of whatever product I would eventually produce. It was also a little embarrassing for me to look back at this paper, the majority of which was written at the end of my junior year. The paper I wrote for my microbiology thesis was WORLDS better and it was striking to realize how much I had improved as a writer since that first draft.
Below I have posted my first working draft of the completed paper, after I had picked it back up but before my adviser had added his revisions.