Last semester, Folklore and Mythology concentrator Noah A. Hoch ’11 paused from thesis-writing for a moment of reflection.

“I realized that I wasn’t enjoying or connecting with my thesis,” he says.

“I e-mailed the other seniors in the program to try to figure out if something was wrong or if I should just plough through.”

But when he conferred with fellow concentrators, he faced a surprising consensus.

“Every person told me that they were enjoying their work,” he says.

Hoch attributes the positive responses to the flexible thesis requirements that are extended to the five senior concentrators in Folklore and Mythology.

This year, the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology decided to further expand these requirements in order to give students the opportunity to assert more creativity in their thesis projects.

As a result, beginning next year, seniors will have the option to either complete a traditional written analysis or pursue another medium of representing their time within the concentration.

Struggling with his written thesis—a critical assessment of the internet as a medium for folklore creation—Hoch chose to take advantage of the flexible thesis requirements that are already in place.

He is now expanding upon an idea for a short story that he had devised—with folklore theory in mind—for a creative writing class.

NEW POSSIBILITIES

Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology Chair Stephen A. Mitchell says that the new flexibility in thesis requirements will focus more attention on what the students want to take away from their undergraduate experience.

“The [written] thesis is still in place, and people can still choose to do it, but they can also choose to do some sort of performance or exhibit, or an extended essay,” he says.

“We just were imagining that not everyone needs to do an extended scholarly essay to prove that they know the field [when] that could be done in other, more expressive ways,” he says.

When this issue had been raised in the past, the Committee had opted to retain the traditional view of the written thesis requirement, according to Mitchell.