senior thesis boston college

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Q. How do I find a Boston College thesis or dissertation?

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Answered By: Steve Runge Last Updated: Feb 02, 2018     Views: 4402

Recent (post-2008) Boston College undergraduate honors theses  and graduate theses and dissertations are in the eScholarship archives.

You can also check to see if the thesis or dissertation you need is online via   ProQuest Dissertations & Theses .

If you can't find it via the above options, search the catalog  to see if the thesis is available on microfilm.  The microfilm area is located on level one of O'Neill Library.

If you cannot find the thesis/dissertation through any of the above options, please contact the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books, Special Collections and University Archives .

Send Burns Library an e-mail or contact by phone at 617-552-4861.

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Boston College Libraries News

Undergraduate Theses in eScholarship@BC: a Part of Boston College’s Institutional Record

The eScholarship@BC program makes possible the preservation of the thesis work of undergraduates as part of the University’s institutional record.  Archived theses are accessible either openly via the internet, or on Boston College campus premises only.  Students, with guidance from their faculty advisors, can elect the most suitable type of access on the thesis deposit form.

The Libraries support thesis students who take advantage of the eScholarship@BC program in many ways, including research assistance provided by subject librarians during the writing phase, and procedural aid when the time comes for actual submission into the repository.

Guidelines and instructions for submitting a thesis to the repository can be found on the   Undergraduate Theses Submission Guidelines page.

Examples of undergraduate theses archived in eScholarship@BC at present can be seen here .

Questions regarding the undergraduate thesis deposit program may be directed to Lopa Williams at [email protected] .

Published by Lopa Williams

Office: 245 Beacon, CS Department, 4th Floor Telephone: 617-552-3928 Email: Click here for my email address

Recent News

5/2024: RA and senior thesis student Gavin Zhang was awarded the McCarthy Prize for his senior thesis: A framework for formalizing and automating interpretability . Gavin also won the Neuhauser Award. Congratulations, Gavin!

4/2024: PhD student Robbie Jimerson successfully defended his dissertation: Exploring speech recognition for documenting Seneca, an acutely under resourced Native American language . Congratulations, Robbie!

4/2024: RA Annie Liu was recognized as a Scholar of the College for her senior thesis: Asian American Studies at California’s Public Universities: Strategies and Rhetoric of Asian American Student Activism in the Late 20th Century . Congratulations, Annie!

4/2024: RA Danni Qu will be attending grad school in the fall at Carnegie Mellon.

8/2023: Our NSF DLI proposal Bootstrapping a Corpus of Endangered Languages was selected for funding and will start in September 2023.

8/2023: Dr. Eric Le Ferrand (PhD with Steven Bird at Charles Darwin University) is joining our lab as a Postdoctoral Scholar to work on NLP for endangered languages.

1/2023: Former postdoc Dr. Zoey Liu started as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Computational Language Science at the University of Florida.

5/2022: PhD student Robbie Jimerson was an invited panelist for the keynote panel on linguistic diversity at ACL 2022 .

4/2022: MS student Vigneshwar Lakshminarayanan passed his thesis defense: Impact of noise in automatic speech recognition for low-resourced languages .

9/2021: Postdoc Zoey Liu was selected as a CRA/NSF CIFellow for her project "Data-driven evaluation for crosslinguistic low-resource NLP".

• Research guides

Boston College University Archives

Dissertations & theses.

Boston College began offering graduate programs in the 1920s. Since then the format of masters theses and doctoral dissertations has changed with the times: from print books to microfilm and microfiche and now to PDFs. Doctoral dissertations and master's theses are rich information resources. They generally provide original research, but they also offer:

• A comprehensive literature review on the topic
• An extensive bibliography for the topic
• A biography section, which can provide hard-to-find biographical information on a researcher's early life and career
• A snapshot of scholarship at a given time

The catalog includes records for the following formats/locations:

• Print volumes in Burns Library (pre-1966)
• Microforms in O'Neill Library (1966-2008)
• eScholarship@BC (post-2008)

We recommend that you first search for a dissertation or thesis here. Use the  advanced search  option to do a title and/or author search.

See our  search tips  for additional help.

Access to BC Dissertations & Theses

BC dissertations and masters theses published before 1966 are stored offsite. Retrieval can take 2-3 days and these volumes must be used within the library.

For all BC dissertations and theses published after 1966, please see this  helpful guide .

Burns Library has an online request management system.  As you identify what you would like to see, click the "Schedule visit to use in Burns Library" link in the catalog record. 

When prompted to sign-in, either use the Boston College sign-in box to register as a researcher using your BC username and password or use the Guest Researcher box to create an account without a BC username.

Once you've reviewed our registration policies and filled out the registration form, you'll return to the request form.

To complete the form:

For published material: Review item information and add details on the specific volume or copy you wish to see (if needed)

Leave any notes on your request in the Special Requests/Questions field (optional)

Schedule the date you would like to visit the reading room (check  our hours  for more details) at the end of the request form, and press submit.

The reading room staff will have the materials ready for your visit. You'll simply need to show a school or government-issued ID and take a photograph to finish your registration process. 

For help navigating to Burns Library, see  Planning Your Visit

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A storied life

Henry Quinlan | Omni Publishing Company

When Boston College graduate Henry Quinlan turned 80, he and his granddaughter decided to mark the occasion by jumping out of a plane. Skydiving is just one of the adventures Quinlan has embraced during his storied life, which includes helping to oversee the installation of the Make Way for Ducklings statues in Moscow and publishing a biography of Boston Celtics great K.C. Jones.

Quinlan, who grew up in Brighton, graduated from BC in 1961 with a degree in economics. After graduating law school, he joined his family’s publishing business, which was initially focused on legal newsletters. He went on to found Quinlan Press and have a 40+ year career as a publisher.

He published biographies on Jones, NASA astronaut Wally Schirra, and Babe Ruth’s daughter, Dorothy, among others.

Henry Quinlan, BC Class of 1961

“[K.C.] Jones was a wonderful man and told me some great stories," said Quinlan. "One of the stories he told me that was never public was about the biggest compliment he ever received. It was about his singing prowess from Frank Sinatra. When Jones would go on the road, he would go into piano bars and sing. And one night unbeknownst to him, someone brought Frank Sinatra to hear him. Afterwards, Frank Sinatra called him over to his table and he said, ‘K.C., you've got great pipes.’ Jones told me, ‘That was the best compliment I ever received.’ And this from a guy who won 12 NBA championships!”

In the 1980s, Quinlan was part of a publishing venture that included publishing the first telephone book in Moscow since 1936. He befriended Soviet diplomat Vitaly Churkin who was going to collaborate with him on a book about Washington and Moscow. The book never happened, but the friendship with Churkin—who served as Russian Ambassador to the United Nations prior to his death in 2017—endured for more than three decades. Due to his Moscow connections, Quinlan was asked by President George H.W. Bush to organize the publishing of the children's book, Make Way for Ducklings in Russia in 1991 and the erection of the Make Way for Ducklings statues in Moscow. The book and the statues were gifts to the people of Moscow from President Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush as part of the 1991 meeting between Bush and then Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.

“It was really an extraordinary experience,” recalled Quinlan, who visited the White House for dinners and receptions about a half dozen times. “President Bush was very nice. He was a very generous man with his time and thoughts.”

Quinlan and his granddaughters collaborated on several books.

More recently, Quinlan has collaborated with his granddaughters on books about places in Massachusetts. After relocating from New York City back to his home state, Quinlan wrote So, You Think You Know the South Coast? His granddaughter and skydiving partner Caroline Murphy provided the photographs. Quinlan and another granddaughter, Emily Murphy, have written Secret, Hidden & Forgotten Cape Cod . Emily Murphy also provided photos for their other joint book, So You Think You Know Cape Cod ? Books on Boston and the South Shore are forthcoming from Quinlan this fall.

Since he’s been retired, Quinlan has worked with seniors to help them write and publish their memoirs.

He worked on a book with John Cullinane, who founded one of the first successful software companies in the United States. “It was wonderful to work with him,” said Quinlan. “He had great stories, one of which was that he and Steve Jobs did a joint venture that failed utterly. It goes to show that not everyone has great success all the time.”

Quinlan is quick to point out that biographies and memoirs are not only for public figures. “All lives are really pretty interesting.” His rule of thumb is to be positive and do not use a memoir “to settle scores.”

In addition to helping seniors write their memoirs, Quinlan gives talks at senior centers on various topics. He estimates he has given more than 300 talks. His most popular one is called “Happiness for Seniors.”

“When you retire, you have to leave behind what you were, that's ‘used to be,’” he said. “You've got to forge your new life. And some men in particular have a very difficult time in changing their identity.

“I try to teach seniors that you have to find something to that engages you and find a purpose for your life that's outside of yourself. If you're only seeking happiness, you're on a never-ending treadmill for what is a temporary emotion. But when it is coupled with an objective outside of yourself, that will bring meaning and purpose to your life and a certain contentment. It is best to do something that is good for you, but also benefits others.”