Why do we so rarely talk about the rejected Picasso behind Spelman or how the Endowment weathers storms in the market? Research in psychology, architecture, and environmental science indicates that understanding one's surroundings leads to a happier life, yet we are so busy doing Princeton work that we miss the opportunity to analyze how campus influences our experiences or how the institutional makeup structures our learning. This seminar invites students to explore Princeton as a material archive and trains them in field-based methods for data-driven research in support of an independent project of their own design.

Most of us spend hours of our days talking with other people. So what makes interview and survey research different from those everyday conversations? And how do social scientists turn their conversational data into revolutionary research discoveries? This seminar will empower sophomores to find their own answers to those questions-while learning project management skills key to independent work success, expanding their networks on (and beyond!) Princeton's campus, and transforming a genuine personal passion into an intellectually and socially impactful research project.

Archives hold humanity's history - or at least some of it. So what is stored in archives? How do humanities scholars discover fascinating objects, learn from them, and publicize their new knowledge? This seminar demystifies research students might undertake in Firestone's C-Basement, empowering sophomores to pursue archival projects inspired by their intellectual interests. Through conducting a year-long project in Special Collections, students discover possible pathways for future independent work, cultivate networks of mentors and collaborators, and share their research to reach communities within and beyond the orange bubble.

Hands-on engagement with the process of crafting produces a different type of knowledge than that gained via other methods, such as reading a book or making logical deductions about a corpus. This seminar recenters the embodied human in the humanities, inviting students to make the body (all the way down to their own hands!) central to inquiry and discovery. Students design a year-long, hands-on making project, practicing research skills from forming a compelling question to situating insights and connections within their literary, historical, and/or cultural context. Spend a year putting process over product - and make something!

Sure, the latest issue of Nature is filled with thrilling scientific discoveries. But how do researchers dream up these exciting projects? How can undergraduate students move from textbook knowledge into innovative research questions? And what can scientists at all levels do with our findings once we have them? Entry into the world of original STEM research can seem daunting: this seminar will empower sophomores with strategies to develop novel research questions big and small, evaluate and execute methods for answering those questions, and make scientific discoveries more widely accessible.