Honours is not like your previous undergraduate experience. It is not about lectures and assignments with an intense end-of-year exam. Embedded in a research group and working on a real problem makes it a richer, more personal experience than your undergraduate degree.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, it’s an intense program, but one that has the potential to transform your life (and you can have fun too)!
The Honours program – one year in length if done full-time - consists of a significant research project (75%) and a compulsory coursework component (25%). As part of your Honours program, you will receive training in presentation skills, data analysis and specific techniques, and acquire advanced discipline-related knowledge.
We have deliberately kept coursework and exams to a minimum so your major focus is on your chosen research project.
The independent research project is individual – each student’s experience of Honours will therefore be unique. If you choose a project offered by the Monash BDI*, this will be done in one of our labs, within one of our five Departments, and under the supervision of academic and research staff. The choice of research project and supervisor will be left largely to you. Your supervisor(s) will have experience in supervising Honours students. As part of the Honours program, you will prepare a literature review, and present your research project findings by giving an oral presentation (or two) and writing a research thesis.
What does an Honours thesis look like? You’ll be writing 10,000 – 15,000 words,** and this will account for 80% of your marks in the research component. We advise our students that this equates to roughly four weeks of full-time writing – and it has to be both concise and precise.
The advanced coursework component comprises a common core component, and a discipline-specific component. In the core component, you will complete a statistics module and be required to prepare a written critique of a journal article (usually done under exam conditions, and we take away the title and the abstract so you can really show us your analytical skills). The requirements of the discipline-specific component vary between Departments, but may involve participating in a journal club, attending some advanced lectures or workshops, critically analysing a discipline-specific journal article and an exam (or two).
For those really wanting to know all the details, consult the M3702 Bachelor of Biomedical Science (Honours) and S3701 Bachelor of Science (Honours) Unit Guides.
*There are also a range of projects offered at Monash affiliated Hospitals, Schools, Centres, Institutes and Departments
** This might sound daunting, but help is at hand