The 2021 Wakefield Senior Theses

As Wakefield’s 2021 school year closes, so too do the year-long efforts of each senior on the capstone project of his or her Wakefield experience—the senior thesis.

According to Wakefield Senior Thesis instructor and English Department Chair Matt Zontine, “The Senior Thesis course is the culmination of all that the students have learned about writing, research, presentation, rhetoric, and organization. In a yearlong process, students examine and research whatever interests them and create a final product in both physical and digital formats.”

True. But what the seniors say themselves is even more revealing—and now their work is on display, not only in hard-copy in the Treptow Library, but also online, with the unveiling of this year’s version of the annual Senior Thesis website.

As their final act, the seniors each design and create a website that is a digital presentation of the finished project. For the Honors Thesis students, this consists of an abstract, their 30-page thesis, an annotated bibliography, and a biography of themselves explaining their interest in their topic. Regular thesis students present their collections of shorter pieces and steps created over the year on their topic: an abstract, a list of five guiding questions, an informative speech, a lesson plan taught to their classmates, a persuasive essay, and more, each accompanied by its own annotated bibliography. These students also create an author-biography piece explaining their interest.

Here is the overall 2021 website that houses all of the students' individual thesis websites.