Special Registration Courses
This page introduces you to English department courses that require special registration, describing their purposes and providing instructions on how to register. There are four such courses: Independent Study (ENG 4905), Undergraduate Research (ENG 4911), Internship (ENG 4940), and Honors Thesis Project (ENG 4970).
An independent study registration is appropriate when you and a member of the English Department faculty have developed an idea for an individualized course on a topic which is not being covered in English Department course offerings for that semester. The independent study can focus on literature or other textual and/or visual media, creative writing, projects in advanced composition or rhetoric, or film production. It is like any other course inasmuch as the instructor will assign readings and/or screenings and writing or other assignments that you must complete by deadlines, but unlike other courses to the extent that you are the only student taking it and the meetings with the instructor will not take place at times given in the schedule of courses or in classrooms. Typically, faculty members will only agree to direct independent study projects when they have come to know students through teaching them in ordinary upper-division English courses.
Instructions for completing the Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form for ENG 4905 (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/ under “UNDERGRADUATE FORMS”):
- Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information needed to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
- On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the faculty member directing the independent study, provide a description of the work you will be doing in the independent study. The description should include the topic of the independent study, the texts you will be reading, the media you will be viewing (if required), the assignments you will be completing, and the grading breakdown.
- Ask the faculty member directing the independent study to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, Dr. Murchek will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4905 for the faculty member directing the independent study, and register you for it.
Grading for ENG 4905:
- At the end of the semester, the faculty member directing the independent study for which you are registered will submit a grade for you in the UF grading system.
ENG 4911: Undergraduate Research
An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in two different situations.
On the one hand, you can register for undergraduate research as a free-standing project, in which a member of the English Department faculty agrees to oversee your research on a topic of interest to you and related to the faculty member’s areas of expertise. A student will approach a faculty member with a research topic or question they want to explore, and, in conversation with the faculty member, refine that topic or question, develop a research plan and schedule, and determine the kind of work that will be submitted in the course of the semester. This kind of project differs from independent study primarily by being less predetermined than an individualized course. It will be more open-ended because pursuing research can always lead you to materials you don’t anticipate at the beginning of the project.
On the other hand, faculty members now regularly require that students who want to write scholarly, critical, or theoretical honors theses under their direction register for the undergraduate research course in the semester prior to the one in which they will be registered for the honors thesis course. An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in this situation because it allows students pursuing graduation magna or summa cum laude to do the preliminary reading, research and drafting of materials necessary to complete an honors thesis of 30-50 pages in the semester for which they are registered for the honors thesis course. Because most UF English majors will not have had the experience of writing a 30-50 page essay in their previous English Department coursework, they will need to confront novel research, argumentative, organizational, and rhetorical problems when they write honors theses. When one acknowledges the facts that most students take a week or two at the beginning of a semester to settle into their schedules, and that the readers of honors theses will want to see completed drafts of these projects no later than week 11 or 12 of the thesis-writing semester, it becomes clear that there is relatively little time in that semester to do all the work necessary to complete an honors thesis The undergraduate research registration gives students time to develop their honors theses patiently, methodically, and deliberately, rather than in a desperate rush.
As with the independent study course, most English Department faculty do not agree to direct undergraduate research projects unless they know the students requesting the guidance from previous coursework for the major.
Instructions for completing the Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form for ENG 4911 (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/ under “UNDERGRADUATE FORMS”):
Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information needed to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
- On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the faculty member directing your undergraduate research project, provide a description of the work you will be doing during your undergraduate research registration. The description should include the topic or question the research will address, the materials you will be researching to explore this topic or question (a preliminary bibliography might be helpful here), the work you will submit to receive a grade for the course, and an account of how that work will be assessed.
- Ask the faculty member directing the undergraduate research to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
- Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, Dr. Murchek will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4905 for the faculty member directing the independent study, and register you for it.
Grading for ENG 4911:
- At the end of the semester, the faculty member directing the undergraduate research for which you are registered will submit a grade for you in the UF grading system.
English majors are eligible to have one internship experience count for 3 credits towards the major, as long as they register for ENG 4940 during the relevant term. In order to qualify for credit, the internship has to involve at least 135 hours and it must be aligned with the English major and the carer path envisioned by the student.
If you are looking to register for ENG 4940, begin by filling out the ENG 4940 Internship Application Form. You will be asked to provide the name and contact information of your internship supervisor and of the internship faculty. The internship faculty is the English professor responsible for ENG 4940 during the relevant semester. They will be listed in the English Department’s Undergraduate Courses page. Once you have completed and signed the form, it will automatically be forwarded to your supervisor and internship faculty.
The form will ask you to explain what you intend to learn from the internship and how your work as an intern will help you achieve your learning goals. Because English majors pursue many different career paths, the Department is very flexible in its interpretation of the types of work aligned with English.
DEADLINE: You and the internship supervisor must complete and sign the form by Wednesday of the Drop/Add week.
Once the form has been submitted, the internship faculty will check if the site/employer already has a University of Florida Agreement for Student Internship. If not, the internship faculty with work with your supervisor to sign an Agreement. Once the agreement has been signed by all parties, the internship faculty will register you for ENG 4940.
IMPORTANT: In order for the internship to count for credit, you and your supervisor must submit two completion documents by Wednesday of finals week.
• The internship supervisor must email a job performance evaluation to the internship faculty so that a grade of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory may be submitted to the Registrar. The job performance must be on company or institutional letterhead.
• The student must submit a 200-300-word personal assessment of the work experience provided by the internship. The personal assessment must be emailed to the internship faculty as a Word document.
ENG 4970: Honors Thesis Project
Taking an Honors Thesis Project course is part of the process for writing an Honors Thesis and graduating with high honors (magna cum laude) or highest honors (summa cum laude). You can read more about writing an Honors Thesis and graduating with Honors in English on our website.
Instructions for completing the Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form for ENG 4970 (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/ under “UNDERGRADUATE FORMS”):
Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information I need to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
- On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the first and second faculty readers of your honors thesis project, provide a description of the argument you will be making in the thesis.
- Ask the first and second readers of the honors thesis to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
- Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4905 for the faculty member directing the independent study, and register you for it.
Submission of honors thesis and grading for ENG 4970:
- Your readers will determine a deadline by which you need to submit a final draft of your honors thesis to them so that they can turn in a final grade to Dr. Murchek by the Monday of the last week of classes. They submit this grade so that Dr. Murchek can make a final honors recommendation for you to the graduation coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences by the last day of classes. Your first reader will also submit your grade for the honors thesis course in the UF grading system by the grades submission deadline for the semester.
- You need to submit a copy of the final, approved version of the honors thesis to the English Department by the Monday of the last week of classes. This document can be submitted to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu as an email attachment.
- In the semester in which you graduate, I will inform you of the deadline by which you need to submit the honors thesis to the UF Institutional Repository.