English SMP

The St. Mary’s Project is a year-long, 8-credit, independently designed and executed course of study intended as a capstone experience for a student's time at St. Mary’s. Working in close conjunction with one or more professors, in or outside of the English department, you have the opportunity to explore, in depth, a question or idea that entrances and intrigues you. Many—although by no means all—SMPs are interdisciplinary, bringing together threads from earlier classes taken across the curriculum. Many are highly personal, involving creative or innovative work that ties together four years of study in a meaningful way. SMPs can, in their final form, take the shape of research papers, collections of essays, anthologies of poetry, films, web sites, suites of paintings, graphic novels, operas—all these, and more, have been done in years past.

The College has established certain guidelines for the SMP:

It must be student-initiated;

It must demonstrate methodological competence (by identifying an area to be explored and proposing a method of inquiry appropriate for the topic);

It must draw on and extend knowledge, skills of analysis, and creative achievement developed through previous academic work. It must include a reflection on the social context, the body of literature, or the conceptual framework to which the project is a contribution;

It must be shared with the larger community through some form of public presentation.

Students usually work on their SMP throughout their senior year; in certain circumstances, however, you may choose to begin your project in your junior year, and finish it a term before you graduate.By the middle of your junior year, you should have given serious thought to whether or not you want to do an SMP. Talk to students a year or two ahead of yourself, both in English and in other disciplines, about their projects—or decisions not to pursue one. Talk to faculty you may be interested in working with. Look at the list of past projects; all these projects are archived in special Collections at the Library, and you may request any of them to look at. We are also working to create a more easily accessible browsing library of past projects in the Arts & Letters Divison office—stay tuned for more details. Think about possible topics—what you might wish to spend this much time studying, and about whether the SMP is the right choice for you.

English majors are not required to complete an SMP; instead, they may elect to take an additional 8 hours of upper-division English coursework, 4 hours of which must be at the 400 level. For more information about requirements for the English major, go to www.smcm.edu/academics/aldiv/english/major.htm.

For more details on the SMP, see our guidelines on deciding whether or not to do an SMP and on planning your project, and the College’s general web page on the SMP.