An Honors Senior Project is required for graduation through the WWU Honors College. The Senior Project serves as a “capstone” experience, synthesizing what students have done in their entire education, including but not limited to their work in the major and in Honors.
The term, Senior Project, is vague, and for a reason. The term “Senior Thesis” is easily available, but it is one the WWU Honors College deliberately has avoided. While the project must be “product oriented,” i.e., there must be something tangible at the end of the process, it may be a long paper, that is a thesis, but it may also take several other forms, e.g., a recital, a painting, an album, a bound book, all of which have been quite successful senior projects.
2024
Fem in STEM: a short podcast series, Hannah Thorp and Lina Dahlberg
Behavioral multigenerational outcomes of mild in-utero stress in C.elegans, Aicha Tokar Falatah
Ashes to Algae: Phytoplankton Communities in Early Successional Ponds at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Lillie Tomlinson
Twi Protein Contribution to Genome Integrity in Tetrahymena thermophila, Toby Traudt
Singing the Praises: A Short Album Listening Party, Tristan Trudell
Student Perspectives on Returning to In-Person Learning Modalities, Lance K. Tulloch
Visualising Household Food Resilience, Chloe Unflat
The Dawn of a New Era: Generative AI and the Future of Work, Saunder VanWoerden
To Walk Between Worlds, Ingrid Violette
Sustainable Lab Certification Project Report, Alyssa White and Megan Ellis
Learning and Aligning Structured Random Feature Networks, Vivian White, Muawiz Chaudhary, Guy Wolf, Guillaume Lajoie, and Kameron Decker Harris
Married or Dead: The Girl Next Door, Little Women, and Feminine Irrelevance, Phoenix Willging
DEATH AFTER: A Visualization of Death in a Digital Medium, Cole Yamamura
Shmoomics!, Winter Yi and Dan Pollard
SEL and Literacy Informed Music Education: Songs and Games for the Elementary Music Curriculum, Elijah Yost
Understories: A Queer Rewilding of Ecology and Literature, Aina Zabinski
2023
Become the Monster: Identity, Perception, and What it Means to be Inhuman, Juniper Amundson
Language Barriers Among Immigrant Communities, Rosia Aning
Racial Diversity and Retention Rates of Psychology Faculty in Washington State Public Universities, Chiyo Aoki-Kramer
The Three R's of Exercise: Review, Reframe, Recommend, Liam Arenas-Field
Fierce Female Friendships: An Artistic Representation and Exploration of the Benefits of Gender-Based Inclusivity and Community in STEM, Maya Bachmeier-Evans
SENTIMENTAL VALUE: Developing a model for sentiment & linguistic analysis of cable news, Caitlin Bannister
CBD Levels and Localization in the Body, Jenavieve Barson
Outdoor Therapy for Women: A Coming Home, Drew Baty
Hunting Down Treatment Therapies for Huntington's Disease, Sage Berry
"You Have to Look at Both Sides": Percepticide and Memory in Argentina's Parque de la Memoria, Lily Berver
She Who Seeks the Deep, Laci Bowhay
Enticing Communication: An Examination of Environmental Arrangement Strategies in Early Intervention Settings, Anna Brillault-Kenny and Beatrice King
Verse Engineering: A Compositional Analysis of World Music Cultures, Mosey Brown
Studying the South Lake Whatcom Fire, Lillian Buck
Vail Resorts, Inc. - Valuation and Comprehensive Analysis, Griffin Butler
The Secret History of Bagley Basin: Snow Algae and the Millennia Long Story They Tell, AG Camara, Robin Kodner, Doug Clark, Michael Kraft, and Emma Mickelson
Perspectives on (In)Human(e) Displacement and Migration, Jordan Carey
An Analysis of Clinopyroxene Reaction Rims as Assimilation Chronometers at Cinder Cone Volcano, Lassen National Volcanic Park, California, Annabelle Carozza
Women in Classical Music, Caitriona Cassel
Math Identity: Breaking Barriers and Building Brilliance, Emily Chappell
Dine and Dash: Changing Harbor Seal Numbers and Habitat Use at the Developing Bellingham Waterfront, Holland Conwell
What are our plans missing? What are our missing plans?, Vivien Coop
Recreation: Work That Makes A Difference, Logan Cornwell
Making Space: How the ENGD Makerspace promotes inclusion and belonging, and its success in doing so, Noah Crow
Perceptions of Political Knowledge, Political Participation, and Political Efficacy Among Western Washington University Students, Bryndis Danke
Not All Monsters Live Under Your Bed, Rebecca Davis
Pieces of the Puzzle: How public health fits in with the world, Erin Demir
Frank Wins a Staring Contest with the Universe, Frank DePalma
Language Planning, Education, and Linguistic Identity in the Republic of Ireland, Margo Digiacinto
No Man's Land: Diversify Our Outdoors, Katrina Doerflinger
We Walk in Different Worlds, Olivia Dong
Ego Liminality, Sof Dubois
Getting to Know Community Forestry, Jane Egan
Mistletoe Blooms: A Proposal of Method, Petra Ellerby
Route 666: A Guided Tour Through American Road Trip Horror, Grace Fiser
Salmon Against Humanity: Are Hatcheries a Part of Salmon Recovery?, Janine Fong
Wild Buildings in the Balkans - Using drones and GIS to identify illegal buildings in Galicica National Park, North Macedonia, Marko Foster
Animal-Sediment relationships reexamined, a meta-analysis, Christine Franzen
Framing Dr. Fauci: The Portrayal of Dr. Anthony Fauci by Fox News and CNN in the Early COVID-19 Lockdown, Lilian Froese Raihl
Redefining Drug Education: A Neuroscience-Based Class for High Schoolers, Talia Frost-Belansky
Examining harbor seal predation impacts on Bellingham Technical College's salmon smolt release, Madison Gard and Alejandro Acevedo-Gutierrez
A History of China-Tanzania Relations: How China Became Donor, Friend, and Foe, Lucy Gentry
Joy at the End of the World, Faith Giboney
A Golden Friendship: A Children's Book, Gurleen Gill
Visualizing Animal Fire Responses, Michael Ginster
Assessing Positioning of Centriolar Satellites by the Golgi Apparatus, Jonah Goodfried and Nick Galati
Derivatives, Mikayla Goodkin et al
A Change-Point Analysis of Air Pollution Levels in Silao, Mexico and Fresno, California, Rachael Goodwin
Writing through becoming, becoming through writing: The evolution of poems through 2022 and early 2023, Maya Miracle Gudapati
Media Coverage on Human-Bear Encounters, Robin Hall
Shared Roots: A geochemical investigation of basaltic andesites to understand magmatic cogenesis at the Middle Sister and South Sister volcanoes, central Oregon, Sean Francis Halstead
From Filth it Rises presentation, Griffin Hartz
A Look at Languaging: Linguistic Justice in the Hacherl Research & Writing Studio, Rose Huentelman
Virginity: Not All Rose Petals and Candles, Katherine Hunter
Keystone Species Explorer Website, Claire Hutchings
Solving the Genius Square: Using Math and Computers to Analyze a Polyomino Tiling Game, Noah Jensen
Creating a Knockout Cell Line: Using CRISPR/Cas9 as a Tool for Huntington's Disease Research, Emma Jerome
Creating a Mass-Balanced Food Web Model for a Generalized Restored Estuary in Puget Sound, Penelope Johnson
/kwɪɹ/, Breann Jones
The role of volatile enrichment in the radiogenic heating and thermal evolution of rocky exoplanets, Ula Jones and Asmaa Boujibar
How-to: Make your house a battery--How demand-side management will be one key to a greener future, explained for popular audiences., Olivia Kaulfus
Silicon and Oxygen in Earth’s Core: Applications of Machine Learning to Metal-Silicate Equilibria and Core Formation, Ruben Keane
alternative milks: a musical exploration of identity, violence, and friendship, Fern Keely
The Neuroscience of Creativity (Structure and Emotion), Michael Kihanya
Adventure in Seoul: A Bilingual Korean-English Children's Book, Abigail Landaverde
The Diffusion Illusion: An interdisciplinary approach to modeling cellular calcium dynamics, Katie Lane
Digital Archaeology: Detection of Archaeological Structures Using Convolutional Neural Networks on Aerial LiDAR Data, Katie LaRue
L'Esprit de Lascaux: Exploring group camaraderie in the paleolithic through game design, Logan Lemieux
1. On Adapting Local Food Systems, Nelson Lobo
Lagrangian Mechanics and the Motion of a T-Handle, Eric Maurer
Blood Coagulation Factor IX: Purification, Activation, Crystallization, Juliet McGill
Investigations on the Active Catalyst in Pd Catalyzed Organic Reactions, Riley McGraw
Political Rhetoric: A Personal and Scientific Exploration, Joshua McNeal
Beyond the Meeple: TTRPG's Impact on WWU Students, Nicolas Mendez
Development, Line by Line: An Introspective Case Study on Narrative Identity and Development through Poetry, Milla Miller
Liberalism and its Trail, David Nessa
The Silenced Migrants, Alisa Nguyen
Databases and Deliberation, Britany Orozco and Quentin Jensen
Racism within the Honors College, Zoe Pais