Walk up to any Covenant senior and ask them what SIP is, and they’ll tell you: it’s a 1-2 semester research and writing project that culminates, in most cases, in an extended, research-based essay about 25-30 pages in length. Written by students in their senior year at Covenant, SIP, or the Senior Integration Project, is required for graduation and has been since the early days of the college. However, in the past, things were a little different.
Dr. Gwen Macallister ’95, professor of English and recently appointed the head of Covenant’s English department, shared her experience with SIP back when she was a senior.
“When I was a student here—at least in the English department and I think in most courses—there weren’t actual SIP classes. [Seniors in their last semester] would sign up for SIP, but it was entirely an independent process. It rested completely on the student’s shoulders to be proactive and talk to professors, find a reader, come up with a topic, and basically monitor [their] own progress.”
Not to say that students were completely alone in the process, added Macallister:
“[Some students] had a professor who was more involved with seeking [them] out or setting particular deadlines for drafts and things like that, but it was still very much a self-directed effort. You had to be very disciplined to work without the structure of a course.”
The result, Macallister recalled, was not only satisfying but prepared her well for graduate school.
“I actually really enjoyed working on my SIP and found it to be really rewarding. I had never researched something so thoroughly and extensively, and SIP gave me a taste of what it was like to really be a scholar.”
Maggie Luke ’20 has experienced a similar joy in researching her SIP this semester.
“[My favorite part about researching SIP so far has been] getting to read poetry, both for my own personal edification but also for this project. [I also love] getting to write it, because I don’t feel like there’s a lot of poetry written about the time of being a student because it’s this weird in-between place. But our presence here matters and I want to write about that and I want to write about it well.”
As an English major, Luke gets two semesters to work on SIP: the first set aside for research and the second for writing. However, in many ways, Luke’s research began before her senior year.
“I’m really, really interested in poetry, so one semester I went to [Dr. Bill Tate] with a couple of other students and told him we were really, really interested in this, but knew that Covenant didn’t really offer any more classes on it. So we created our own class and did an independent study where I was able to research Mary Oliver and write my own poetry in response to hers. It was really, really fun and I really appreciated that one-on-one instruction.”
The research Luke started in the independent study provided a foundation for the research she is working on this semester for her SIP. Luke also attributes her confidence to her many English professors, especially Dr. Tate.
“When you get to the SIP, you get to pick your reader, and ideally it’s a professor who’s known you and knows what you’re interested in and good at. So it’s not just you and this paper; it’s you and your research and someone to help you. For me, Dr. Tate has known how to push me and where I need to be going or what my weaknesses and strengths are, and that’s been really cool.”
Armed with research experience, the help of her professors, and her own creative ability, Luke felt confident starting her SIP.
“I definitely felt prepared to do a project of this size, going into my senior year. I’ve written several 10-page papers and gotten good feedback from them, and as I’ve progressed as an English major I’ve learned better and better how to research. I think as long as a student is trying to be faithful to the calling of doing the research, doing the reading, and growing and maturing in that path, they can feel confident and prepared going into SIP.”
Unfortunately, not all students reach their senior year feeling prepared to tackle their own senior integration projects. Over the past couple of years, faculty committees have convened to discuss the results of a research experiment conducted by a higher education consulting firm working for Covenant. Dr. Jay Green, a professor in Covenant’s history department, participated in one such committee this past summer in order to discuss these findings with other departments.
“[By conducting] very comprehensive interviews with a lot of students, this firm found that one thing students craved but that we, either in reality or in our messaging, weren’t offering, was a four-year mentored Capstone experience.”
This finding surprised Green, as well as other members of Covenant’s faculty. After all, a mentored Capstone experience was one in which students learned to think and research critically in preparation for a final project that represented the culmination of their four years in college. For the faculty, this was exactly what SIP has been. However, as Green pointed out, there are two main problems with that.
“First of all, nobody knows what a SIP is outside of Covenant. Even [President Halvorson] cannot talk about ‘senior integration projects’ beyond the walls of Covenant because nobody knows what he’s talking about. So the language of SIP is problematic.”
But even within the walls of Covenant, SIP loses a certain audience, namely, underclassmen.
“SIP focuses on the senior,” said Green, “and says this is a project that you do your last year here; it’s a project for your last semester. And it doesn’t say ‘culmination of a four-year mentored relationship with faculty advisors and mentors, with ideas, with books, with student colleagues.’ So while SIP is good, we need to talk about it differently and make good on the fact that it’s a four-year mentored experience.”
One thing the departments discussed over the summer was a strategy for better communicating the goal and purpose of SIP.
“We’re trying to make the senior project more visibly connected to core curriculum and the earlier courses in the major,” said Green. “I think that’s always been true, but I don’t think that we’ve done as good a job as we should helping students see it.”
The project itself, Green said, “isn’t really changing substantively,” but the lead-up to that final project will be a lot more intentional, so that underclassmen can sooner and better understand the significance of their classes—classes they might otherwise disregard as mere requirements for graduation.
“[After discussing Capstone with the other departments] I’m trying to be more intentional when I advise students,” said Green. “I don’t want to just watch them check boxes but to help them see how their different courses, especially ones that might not feel particularly relevant to their major, are preparing them as a student who’s on a pathway toward the Capstone experience.”
Because, in many ways, SIP is students’ final impression of their Covenant education, Green believes that it is important to spend time aligning students’ perceived purpose of their senior projects with its stated purpose.
“The main reason for changing to Capstone,” said Green, “is to be clearer to ourselves and to the outside world who we are, what we value, and why the experiences we’re inviting students to in our core and majors are special. The greater coherence provided by the language of Capstone is designed to do that.”
Green anticipates that the new language of Capstone will start rolling out with the 2020-2021 undergraduate catalog, in which SIP classes will be replaced with Capstone classes. In the meantime, many professors, including Green, have already started using the term Capstone with current students in preparation for the change.