Undergraduate Study Basics
Advisors oversee students’ registration process in order to make sure that they take their required courses on time and meet the graduation requirements set by the department, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the University. The rules, requirements, and various difficulties of the registration process can sometimes become frustrating. Remember that your advisors are here to help you navigate these, but they do not have the authority to change the graduation requirements or bend the undergraduate regulations. If you have a complicated schedule, you must see your advisor. Please check the academic calendar for the day students are expected to meet their advisors regarding their course schedules.
Once the registration hurdle is over, you can visit your advisor during their office hours to discuss academic and nonacademic issues such as summer school, financial aid, serious health issues, graduate school, career planning etc. Please consult exchange, double major, and certificate program coordinators for questions regarding these options.
Please read the “FAQ-Undergraduate Students” section under the “Registration” tab. This information will be useful throughout your undergraduate education:
https://advising.boun.edu.tr/en
You should also be familiar with the Undergraduate Regulations (Lisans Eğitim ve Öğretim Yönetmeliği), which can be found here:
- During the registration period, you need to send your program to your advisor for approval. If you don’t send your program, you’ll not be registered.
- Freshmen (First-year students) are given a set schedule. You just need to send it for approval.
- In every semester, except for the Senior year, you need to take at least 15 credits.
- You should repeat F’s as soon as they are offered. Unless it is automatically added, you need to add the course with the “repeat with” option.
- You CAN NOT take PE, AE, and PA for credit.
- You CAN NOT take an extra course (OVERLOAD) unless you have a GPA of 3.00 or above! OVERLOAD means 7 courses and 20 credits maximum! If your GPA is not 3.00 or above, you can take a course as NON-CREDIT.
- FA Courses: You can take FA courses as HSS or Unrestricted Electives (not as departmental electives). Two FA courses are allowed in four years unless you are in the Film Certificate program.
- Unrestricted Electives: You can take any course except AE (Advanced English). We don’t recommend ED courses as electives. 100-level foreign language courses can be taken as UNRESTRICTED.
- HSS Electives: SOC /PSY /HIST/ PHIL /POLS/LING courses and 200-300-400 level Foreign Languages courses. ONLY 200, 300 and 400-LEVEL FOREIGN LANGUAGE COURSES COUNT AS HSS ELECTIVES. HSS stands for Humanities and Social Sciences. If you are unsure about a course, ask the assistants or your advisor.
- If your GPA is below 2.00 and you are in ON PROBATION status, you cannot overload your schedule and take a minimum of 14 credits (5 courses). If your GPA is below 2.00 and you are in a REPEATING status, you can take 11 credits (4 courses) and 2 new courses maximum!
- Withdraw means “Dersten Çekilme”. If you withdraw from a class, on your transcript, the course you’ve withdrawn from will be marked with a “W” instead of a grade and it will not count for credit. A student may withdraw from a course 3 times until graduation. If she/he is under 15 credits, the system will not allow him/her to withdraw so he needs to submit a petition to “Dekanlik”. There is a time window for the “withdraw” period. Check it on the academic calendar.
- You cannot convert credit courses to noncredit or vice versa. So, decide carefully. If you fail a noncredit course, you must retake it. You cannot graduate with an “F” grade.
Each professor schedules time outside of class hours to meet with students and discuss the course materials or other related interests of the student. Professors generally announce their office hours at the beginning of each semester. You can also check the weekly schedules on their doors or get an appointment by email.
Professors do not require students to attend office hours. Students can use the office hours to ask questions about course materials, get advice on their course work, ask for further reading etc. Communicating with your professors during office hours will help you resolve problems you might be having in a class, especially if you make a habit of going to office hours well before exams or assignment deadlines. Office hours are not tutoring sessions. You need to go over the course materials and have specific topics to discuss before your visit. Additionally, you can build relationships with professors and enrich your learning experience by sharing your interests in literature, art, and culture. However, please make sure that once you make office hours appointments, you keep them.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of another person or source without attribution. Essentially, it’s intellectual theft.
What’s the most common form of plagiarism?
Plagiarism is not just copying words without quotation marks. The worst form of plagiarism is using someone else’s work and turning it in as your own, or even turning in a Wikipedia-esque pastiche of multiple authors’ works as your own. However, this is not the only way to plagiarize.
Common forms of plagiarism:
- Using another writer’s ideas without giving them credit.
- Summarizing the content of a writer’s work without giving them credit.
- Having a friend or hired writer create your paper for you.
- Buying papers online.
This is why it’s very important to learn how to cite properly, but also to make sure that you begin researching papers well in advance of their due dates.
Literary Studies uses MLA Style for citations. A good guide to this is on the Purdue Owl website. [https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/]
How can I avoid plagiarism?
- Be very careful when taking notes for your research papers. Make sure that you note the page number from which you’ve taken your information. Have a good, ordered system for keeping track of your research and its sources. This system should include key words and themes.
- Paraphrase as you’re taking notes. One of the easiest ways to avoid plagiarism is to turn a writer’s words into your own. Doing so will also help you better understand what you’re reading.
- Be very careful to cite when you’re writing up your paper. Your first draft should have proper citations. Going back to insert citations after you’ve written your first draft will be very difficult and confusing.
- Submit your paper to Turnitin in advance of its deadline if you have the option to use the website. Some WLL classes make use of the plagiarism-detecting site to teach their students how not to plagiarize, as well as to ensure that you’re following the department’s academic code.
At the Department of Western Languages and Literatures, we take plagiarism very seriously, and students who plagiarize may find themselves facing disciplinary action.
Do your own work to avoid plagiarism. Do your research in advance and be sure to paraphrase, but also to give credit where it is due!
GENERAL GUIDELINES FOR “EL 412: SENIOR THESIS”
Preparation and Initial Steps:
* You can register for EL 412 during your 7th or 8th semesters. Please make sure that you begin a conversation with your prospective thesis advisor at the end of the previous semester. In other words, start to identify a potential topic and texts early on.
* Once the semester begins, you should plan on solidifying your thesis topic with your advisor by the end of the second week of classes. The project proposal form, which will include a brief abstract of your project, will be due by the end of the fourth week of classes.
Project Parameters:
* Given that we are a Department of English Literature, your thesis should prioritize the works of Anglophone authors. However, you can choose to write a comparative study that includes Anglophone works alongside other examples from World Literature.
* Similarly, the main focus of your thesis should be on literary texts, but you are free to supplement your study with a wider variety of “texts”, such as art and visual culture, films, and performances. These supplementary materials should be incorporated in consultation with your advisor.
* Ideally, your thesis project should explore texts that you have not encountered during your undergraduate education. However, it might be possible to return to certain previously studied texts in relation to new ones. These decisions should be made in consultation with your advisor.
Basic Requirements:
* The minimum length of the Senior Thesis should be 40 double-spaced pages composed in 12-point font.
* The in-text citations and final bibliography should follow MLA citation guidelines.
* One hard-bound copy of the thesis must be submitted to the Department of Western Languages and Literatures. The grade for this course will be contingent on the Department’s receipt of the hard-bound copy.
* The Senior Thesis should represent your original work. Please refer to the Department’s printed guidelines regarding plagiarism for further details.
Undergraduate Study Information
Departmental Class Representatives
The class representative is someone who acts as a liaison or connection between a class (i.e. the first years, second years, juniors, or seniors) and the faculty of Western Languages and Literatures. For example, if students have an idea or opinion, or issue that they would like to communicate to the faculty, the class representative is someone who can be the vehicle for that. Of course, this doesn’t mean that students cannot contact faculty members individually – you are always welcome to contact your professors to communicate with them on a range of issues. This is simply an additional (and collective) vehicle of communication.
Class representatives are chosen through an election process at the beginning of each academic year. Advisors collect the names of interested candidates during the first couple of weeks of classes, and we then invite the students to vote over a 2-day period. Once the class representative is appointed, their email is displayed on the department’s website so that students can contact them when necessary.
ÖTK is the representative body for the undergraduate and graduate students of Boğaziçi University. Just as the departmental class representatives facilitate communication between students and faculty within Western Languages and Literatures, ÖTK facilitates communication between the student body as a whole and the University administration. ÖTK representatives are typically chosen through an election process at the beginning of each year, and each department sends a number of students to represent their particular “constituency”.
Each semester, the Department of Western Languages and Literatures puts out a call for undergraduate students who are interested in assisting faculty members with various tasks. These might include helping faculty members with small-scale research assignments like finding images to accompany a power-point lecture or a library search around a particular topic, as well as more daily tasks. These are paid positions, and the general understanding is that a student assistant will devote no more than five hours per week to their tasks. A student assistantship is a great way to get to know the process involved in preparing courses or undertaking research projects, as well as an excellent item for your CV.
