About

Think You?!, the Proceedings of the Bay Honors Research Symposium, is the collection of student work of those who present at the Bay Honors Research Symposium. The Symposium is held annually, organized by the Bay Honors Consortium. All students who present at the Symposium are accepted via a competitive process; all work is done as part of an honors course or an honors contract at a California Community College.

The editor of Think You?! checks the student work for overall presentation, including ensuring that all conventions for publishing are correct, and that the style guide is being followed. We rely on the mentors to check all other aspects of the student work. In order to have their work published on Think You?!, students must have their work fully vetted by their mentoring professor(s). The mentors check the work for accuracy, ethics with respect to procedure, correct citation for the discipline, and overall logic of work. Students can submit a paper of their work, a video of their presentation, or both. The Publication Release and Mentor Signature Form must be completed in full in order for the student work to be accepted; if the project involves interviews, we require an Interview Subject Release Form completed for each interview subject.

We take work twice a year. The Call For Papers for the annual Symposium is 15 August, with submissions due on 30 September. We do a Past Call For Papers for all previous Symposia annually, with the due date being 1 January. Students and mentors are notified when the student work is received and when the work has been officially published.

The History of Think You?!

How did we start this project? Well, the Bay Honors Consortium was at a monthly meeting in 2011 at City College of San Francisco. Lillian Marrujo-Duck, then-professor in History at CCSF, asked if the group would be interested in somehow documenting student work at the Symposium, something like a blog or journal. Sarah Harmon, an adjunct professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Cañada College, was also interested in this project. Lillian already had a blog of her student work going, a place for some of her history students to showcase their work to a larger audience: Voices Like Yours. For this site, Lillian did web design and the collecting of student work. Sarah had years of technical writing under her belt, and had worked for years on the side as an editor and technical writer for various companies. From there, the idea was hatched to come up with something new and different: take a student conference, publish the proceedings, and make it so that students could list a publication.

And the name…it’s, well, a bit different. We wanted to have a name for the journal that encapsulated the open nature of the Symposium, where all academic disciplines are accepted, and the goal was to expose community college students to a typical academic conference experience…but still have the whimsy of being a student. We posed the question, and exclaimed, at the same time: Think You?! From there, our title was born.

In the beginning, we were just about publishing the student work. As we worked year after year together, we got a feel for how to make Think You?! more student-centered. Our goal has always been to make the student work shine. Since the proposals are accepted through a competitive process, we felt confident that we would be showcasing the best work of the year in the community colleges. But we wanted to bring more attention to the work. We started accepting presentations along with papers, so that those with more visual-heavy presentations could show off their work. We also included a focus on the student award winners: The Heslet Award, and then later the Katharine Award along with it. This partnership held until 2016, as Lillian had to step away due to her new role as the Interim Dean of Humanities at CCSF.

Starting in 2017, Sarah has been the sole editor of Think You?!. It was that year that a new direction of the site took shape. The incorporation of newer graphics and a standard format was part of the stage. The revamped site is due to a huge amount of support from her husband, Michael Smith, who is the webmaster for the BHC site, and from others who help with more technical issues.