The students who are required to do a senior thesis are those in the Honors College, or if your major requires you to do it. For myself, environmental studies majors, we are given a few options. We can take three additional courses at the advanced level, which is the 200-level, that have to do with our concentration--like environmental health, community development, and policy; we also can do an internship, or we can do a senior thesis.
And within that option there are a bunch of different senior thesis options. For myself, I'm doing this really unique option through the environmental studies department, called Students Teaching Students, where you actually develop the curriculum for a legitimate UVM class that you will teach. It's a three-credit class that any UVM student can take, except first-year students.
So, mine is going to be about this incredible club on campus called FeelGood. It's part of a national nonprofit, where our mission is to end chronic, persistent world hunger one grilled cheese at a time. So, we have various college delis on 24 college campuses around the world now. We have one in the Philippines, the rest in the U.S., and one is starting up in Paris, which is very exciting. But all of those profits from the delia then go towards The Hunger Project or Choice Humanitarian, which are organizations working towards the sustainable end of hunger and extreme poverty in our lifetime.
So, my class is going to be about that. It won't be about the finer points of making grilled cheese; it will be more association with transformational leadership for social change, social entrepreneurship, utilizing social media for social change--just so many different things--what hunger and poverty means to us. I'm so excited about the class. But, again, you can do that as an undergraduate student, which, I think, is really unique to UVM because they do a whole bunch of hands-on learning here, which I really enjoy.