Bioterrorism thesis paper

In my years of college teaching I have kept my goal to enable students by providing the tools needed to become life-long learners of the course topic. In the present course I never assumed that I could teach you everything about the scientific bases of Bioterrorism. Rather, I wanted you to come to understand the basic nature of biological terror agents (viruses, bacteria, poisons, etc.), some of the means by which we can defend ourselves against them (vaccines, antibiotics, antisera, etc.), and MOST OF ALL I wanted you to become facile in the use of tools to find, understand/learn, and assess appropriate resources. In this way you have gained the necessary fundamental knowledge, but more importantly, you are now able to continue to learn this material as it becomes relevant.

With that in mind it is now time to demonstrate your skills by the preparation of a term thesis paper. As the name implies, a term paper is your opportunity to pursue a topic at a level above and beyond what we have achieved in this course. Furthermore, as a thesis paper you are to present an idea and “argue” for it.

Your assignment is this:

By the end of the module, on any topic relevant to the course theme of Bioterrorism, develop a thesis statement. Then prepare a term paper in which that thesis statement is presented, and convincingly defended.

A few directions:

1. Choose ANY topic you’d like, just be sure it is relevant to our course.
2. Your paper should be in thesis format, that is you make a statement and defend it. DO NOT write a “report” in which you present information about a topic. Thus, topics like “The Pros and Cons of the Smallpox Vaccine” are NOT acceptable, but “There are pros and cons to administering the smallpox vaccine, but overall it is not advisable to administer the vaccine to the general population.” Note that the former paper topic is a “report”, whereas the latter is a statement that the writer must present and argue for. You should consult the ESC Writers’ Complex and me for help preparing such a paper.
3. Your paper should be at least 2500, but no more than 5000, words (BTW, under standard page formatting 2500 words is approximately five pages, but use the ‘word count’ feature of your wordprocessor to be certain). I present this requirement not to define how much typing you should do, but rather to set an expectation of how muchthinking I am expecting.

What steps should you take to prepare your paper? Start by doing some preliminary research on a topic that is of interest to you. This topic could be one that we covered in one of the modules, or can be on something that we didn’t. Once you have done that preliminary work use the discussion area to present your GENERAL IDEA to the class. You can expect your classmates and me to ask questions and make constructive comments. Based on that feedback refine your idea into a thesis statement and, again, present that idea in the second week’s discussion area. I expect that you will find it useful in developing your ideas to write down your topic at several stages of ‘development’ and getting/giving feedback.