|
FEEDBACK
Comprehensive Essay (HST 700)
In your final semester in the program, you should expect to enroll in HST 700: Historical Integration, a three-credit course designed as an integrative capstone experience for your MA work. Satisfactory performance in the Comprehensive Essays or “comps” is a requirement for graduation for students selecting this option. What follows is a brief description of the process:
- Prior to enrolling for HST 700: Historical Integration, you will nominate
to the Graduate Committee a list of two or three faculty members who
will constitute your own Comprehensive Committee. The Graduate Committee
will then review your request and approve Committees for each student
with an eye to distributing this responsibility as fairly and equitably
as possible among the faculty. One member of the Committee will serve
as chairperson.
- The Committee will meet very early in the semester to review your
program, to develop a set of comprehensive questions, and to suggest
an appropriate reading list. We will expect you to participate in this
process by suggesting issues, themes, or questions that cut across your
particular courses and that could provide the basis for Comprehensive
questions. Helping to create the comprehensive questions is, in fact,
part of the Comprehensive experience. The Questions themselves will
reflect the overriding goal of “integration” within your course of study,
and particularly the major field, and will enable you to draw upon material
covered in your various courses. The reading list will help you to fill
in any obvious gaps in your knowledge base and will provide stimulating
comparative, integrative, or theoretical readings appropriate to the
questions.
- No later than the third week of the semester, the Committee will share
the questions and the reading List with you.
- You should be in touch with members of your Comprehensive Committee
during the semester to discuss the readings and to review your approach
to the questions.
- We anticipate that you will write a total of 30-40 pages, divided
among the questions as prescribed by the Committee.
- Your essay is due to the Committee no later than the final week of
the semester.
- Oral examinations on the Comprehensive Essays will normally
be scheduled during the final exam week.
- The Committees will mark the Comprehensive Essay as Honors, Pass, or No Credit and will communicate those results to the Director of the Graduate Program.
