After a five-year hiatus, seniors in the University Honors Program presented their senior theses in the Locatelli Center last Thursday. Encompassing a year’s worth of research, students described their theses by answering three core questions: what they did, why they did it and how they did it. Visitors were able to walk around the area to read and ask questions while enjoying the catered Rocco’s Tacos and Shawarmaji.

During the pandemic, Honors Program manager Ethan Mulberg worked with other faculty in the Honors Program to hold the showcase online by having students record an elevator pitch about their project. While it was an effective solution under the circumstances, Mulberg didn’t find it ideal.

“Being in person is 100% better than online,” Mulberg said. “It’s way different. The energy and the enthusiasm students had about their projects, being able to talk about it and share it with people–you can’t really capture that feeling online.”

Senior Davis Robertson, a computer science and philosophy double major, worked in the SCDI Robotic Systems Lab (RSL) lab on a project called Nautilus, an underwater ROV.

“I felt a great sense of pride in our community of scientists, thinkers, engineers and artists,” Robertson said. “Everyone I spoke to had something awesome and impressive to share and getting to see the work that my peers have done was certainly the best part of the showcase. There are certain events that cannot be fully recreated online. It was great to have the opportunity to speak to people face to face so I’m glad that the showcase returned as an in-person event this year.”

While presenting had been exclusive to honors students in the past, this showcase included other students conducting research under faculty mentorship. The variety of projects ranged across many different departments. From building animatronics to exploring dance theory or creatively analyzing corporate financials, students were allowed to dive into any topic, usually passion projects and topics of interest, Mulberg said.

As a mechanical engineering major, senior Julien Buist-Thuillier’s thesis project was the same as his senior design project for the Engineering School. He worked on a robotic remote-controlled rover meant to remove invasive algae from the lakebed of Lake Tahoe in a project called Advanced Lakebed Guardian and Algae Eradicator (ALGAE)– what he calls a “Roomba for removing algae.” His team of five in the RSLspent the past year devising a solution and bringing it to life from scratch.

“It’s kind of the first chance you get to do something really hands-on,” Buist-Thuillier said. “Especially as an engineer, it can be really frustrating to do a lot of theoretical coursework. The senior showcase project is all hands-on, getting to apply everything you’ve learned for four years all at once in the machine shop, in the Maker's Lab, putting it together. It’s been super fun. Very time-consuming, frustrating at times, but very gratifying in the end.”

For senior Lauren Clark, it was a rewarding experience to apply her philosophy and religious studies majors in her honors thesis. With her concept of dignity in relation to the ecological crisis of climate change and artificial intelligence, she was glad to have the showcase in person again so she could better interact with and understand her peers’ projects.

“I really like being able to see the other person and if they’re understanding what I’m saying, if they’re excited about a certain point that I can go into more,” Clark said. “Being able to feel your audience makes a big difference.”

She also felt coming offline created a better energy when presenting the ultimate work of her final year at Santa Clara.

“It’s such a big accomplishment, so being able to do it in-person is really awesome,” Clark said. “It gives it more of a sense of finality, instead of just being like, ‘I’m done, I presented online,’ seeing the board, and saying, ‘wow, this is an actual tangible piece of what I did.’ Otherwise, sometimes it can kind of live in the online universe and you don't fully realize this is an achievement that you accomplished.”

Despite Santa Clara returning to in-person classes in 2021, the Honors Program department chose not to completely return the thesis showcase to in-person until now. Mulberg believed everyone was still in a COVID-19 mentality and used to an online world for a time, even after the pandemic itself ended.

“We were giving ourselves time as a program to just adjust back,” Mulberg said. “But almost three years removed now, we want to be connected and do things in person as much as possible. One of my goals in the Honors Program and at Santa Clara in general is creating that sense of community and spaces where people connect and share their ideas and make new ideas, so having it in-person is going to continue being an annual thing.”