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- PPE Core Courses
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- Honors Requirements
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In addition to fulfilling the prerequisites, PPE core, and distribution requirements, Honors students will take two courses in their theme and dedicate their thesis to a research project in that theme. Honors students will fulfill their thesis requirement using the vehicles offered for that purpose by one of PPE's three sponsoring departments: philosophy, political science, or economics. Students should choose the appropriate thesis track depending on their primary disciplinary orientation and the content of their theme. One of the two required honors courses must be in a discipine other than that of the thesis. Honors students will submit a thesis proposal for approval by the director of PPE, ideally by the end of their junior year.
Honors in PPE will be recommended by a two-person committee consisting of the student's advisor plus a second reader in one of the other units, on the basis of the written thesis and an oral defense. The final award of Honors is conditional on achieving a 3.5 GPA both overall and in PPE, and on approval by the director of PPE.
Honors Thesis Course Requirements:
- Philosophy Orientation: Seniors will first enroll in PHIL 401, the thesis-preparation seminar in the Department of Philosophy. The following term, they will enroll in PPE 402, in which they will work with an individual advisor who has agreed to supervise their research.
- Political Science Orientation: Seniors will enroll in POLISCI 493 and POLISCI 494, a two-semester thesis-writing seminar that runs in conjunction with supervision under an individual thesis advisor.
- Please note that POLISCI 381, Political Science Research Design, is a prerequisite for POLISCI 493–4 and must be taken any term before senior year. POLISCI 381 satisfies the Formal Reasoning Core Distribution requirement for PPE and hence does not add to the total number of courses required for a PPE degree.
- Economics Orientation: Seniors will enroll in ECON 495, Seminar in Economics or ECON 498, Honors Independent Research. Most economics-oriented PPE theses would be esxpected to enroll in ECON 495, which is the primary Honors thesis vehicle for economics concentrators.
