CHSS Director Megan Bruce tells us about the new CHSS Dissertation module which saw the first final year CHSS students take it up this academic year!
When I took over as Director of Combined Social Sciences three years ago, one of the first things I did was to look at previous student feedback to see what students thought of the programme. One issue that kept coming up was the lack of our own dissertation module. Students were really keen to bring together the ideas and theories from their different departments into a single interdisciplinary capstone project.
This was quite a big project to set up, and I wanted to be sure we’d thought of everything, so I had conversations with leaders of other Combined degree programmes around the country as well as with our external examiner, Carl Gombrich, who is a leading academic in the field of interdisciplinary studies. They were very helpful in terms of considering practicalities, as well as suggesting literature on how best to assess the interdisciplinarity of a project.
I also wanted to bring in some local support for the module, so was delighted when Will Craige from the Dept of Sociology got in touch with me to see if I was looking for a co-convenor. Will has run methods training and dissertations in Sociology for a long time, so had lots of great skills and experience to bring to the project.
The new dissertation module was formally approved last spring, and I was pleased that several students were immediately keen to take the module. Our criteria for accepting students onto the module are twofold: the project needs to be suitably interdisciplinary; and we have to be able to find an appropriate supervisor for each student.
Out of around 10 applications, four were suitably interdisciplinary and luckily I was able to find a supervisor who could support each student. Each student on the module is allocated a single supervisor, with all projects being second marked by one of the module convenors to ensure consistency.
Will and I run three dissertation sessions for the whole cohort: one introductory meeting to explain the module; and then two further targeted workshops on the practicalities of dissertation writing.
The supervisors provide detailed individual supervision sessions throughout the project, and all four supervisors have been fantastic in getting on board with the module and taking on a new kind of dissertation at really quite short notice. I’m hugely grateful for their contributions and support.
We are still in the middle of our first year of the module, but all four projects are shaping up nicely and I’m really looking forward to reading the finished results!
The interdisciplinary dissertation module is open to Combined Social Sciences students, and if you’re interested in taking it next year the proposal deadline is Friday 20th March. Check your email or contact me to get the proposal form. The full module outline is available here: https://www.dur.ac.uk/faculty.handbook/module_description/?year=2019&module_code=COMB3002
Three out of our four current students on the module are planning to go on to postgraduate study which is interdisciplinary in nature, so anyone else in that position would probably also find this a valuable finale to their Combined Social Sciences degree.
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