Student Life

Senior Thesis

The senior thesis project is considered the capstone of a Trinitas education; its goal is to demonstrate classical Christian thinking at its best in high school seniors. During the fourth quarter of their junior year students select a topic about which to research and write. They don’t merely write a summary, but actually write an argument based on their research and then try to persuade the rest of the world to see it their way. By the beginning of senior year, students will have read hundreds of pages, narrowing their topics and staking out a position. They spend the first semester writing a paper of about fifteen pages that draws on their research and supports the thesis they have proposed. Soon after the writing process ends, seniors stand before a panel of faculty and board members to answer questions and defend their thesis as an audience of family and friends look on.

This project gives Trinitas seniors a small foretaste of the kind of academic testing they will experience at university. It also brings the fruit of a Christ-centered and classical education to bear as students draw from the tools they have acquired in the grammar, logic, and
rhetoric stages and weigh everything on the scales of Scripture. Students enter the great conversation through the senior thesis project—by no means uttering the final word, but taking the opportunity to make their own educated assertions on things that matter in the fabric of human existence.