Students sometimes wonder about the “Educ 399 Independent Study” listing in the schedule of classes. What does it mean, and how can I tell if it’s a good fit for me?
399. Independent Study— Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor and director are required for enrollment. (1-2 course credits) -Staff
An independent study means that you design your own syllabus of academic readings and writing assignments, and persuade a faculty member to agree to meet regularly with you and evaluate your work, typically for one credit. Since a one-credit independent study has higher expectations for academic work than a half-credit exploratory internship, Trinity allows us to count an Educ 399 toward the Educational Studies major.
Finding a faculty sponsor for your independent study may not be easy, because Trinity College does not offer faculty any financial compensation or career incentives to do this. If you have not previously enrolled in a course a faculty member, they are unlikely to agree to work on an independent study with you, because you are unfamiliar to them. Furthermore, scheduling frequent meetings with an individual student on a solo topic is not an efficient use of most faculty members’ limited teaching time.
If you wish to persuade an Educational Studies faculty member to supervise your independent study, then consider this advice:
- Take charge of your learning and plan ahead. Independent studies do not work for passive students who wait until the last minute to meet deadlines.
- Read examples on this web page (and elsewhere) and mine them for ideas about how to deepen your learning.
- “Independent study” does not necessarily mean “one solo student.” Instead, the most successful Educ 399 projects have consisted of 2-5 students who shared the same interests and created their own mini-class.
- Start drafting a syllabus (ideally, with other students) of your learning goals, readings, writing, and other types of assignments that you believe will deepen your learning. Compose this in a collaborative Google Document to share.
- Schedule a meeting to show your progress and persuade a faculty member to work with you. The most persuasive arguments will:
- come from 2 or more students working in a small group (rather than solo efforts)
- come from students who have already had a course with that faculty member, to build on prior learning
- connect with academic topics that interest that faculty member, either because they have taught or researched or supervised related work in the past, or because it’s something that they personally wish to learn more about in the future
Examples of successful Educ 399 independent study projects:
- Mohammed Albehadli designed an independent study in 2019 as a research assistant for a study that employs survey and interview methods to investigate how Asian American parents navigate the landscape of school choice in the Greater Hartford Region
- Emily Schroeder designed an independent study based on reading and writing policy analysis while working as a policy intern with the CT Early Childhood Alliance in 2018.
- Emily Meehan, Christina Raiti, and Elaina Rollins created an Educ 399 project on teaching and pedagogy. Drawing on their Educ 200 course, they designed 3rd grade lessons on writing, science, and mathematics, which they taught at a nearby school, video-recorded themselves in action, and wrote reflections on the process and what could be improved.
- Danielle Dooldorian and Brigit Rioual created an Educ 399 project on race and social class in higher education. They built on prior classes with and expanded on readings drawn from Prof. Dougherty’s Color and Money first-year seminar (which they had not taken, but had an existing syllabus). They also produced mini-research projects on Trinity primary source data that could be used by future students.
