Senior Comps

a senior Oxy student shows off his senior comps studio art project in Los Angeles

At Occidental, your senior year is more than just a finish line—it’s a chance to bring everything you’ve learned together in a powerful way. Every student completes a senior comprehensive project, or “comp,” designed to showcase what you’ve accomplished over the last four years.

Depending on your field, your senior comps might be a research paper, a public presentation, an art show, a film, or a creative performance. Guided by faculty and supported by your department, you’ll tackle a meaningful project that challenges you to think big and do your best work. Many students say it’s their most rewarding academic experience and a launchpad for graduate school and their career.

What project will you pursue?

You might draw your comps inspiration from your diverse surroundings in Los Angeles or your research and exploration abroad. You might explore the emotional geographies of the Great Migration, the international politics of the Butterfly Effect, or generating music using artificial intelligence. Rigorous yet rewarding, senior comps empower Oxy students to exceed their own expectations and discover what they’re truly capable of.

Check out some recent examples:

Arts & Humanities

Oliver Otake

Media Arts & Culture
Bamboo Roots is a multimedia documentary project that explores untold histories of post-WWII Japanese America through the storytelling of Oliver’s grandparents, Toshiro and Keiko Otake. The project takes form as a website with video interviews as well as an interactive gallery exhibition featuring short films, family artifacts, and more.

Lainey Bohnert

Chinese Studies
Lainey mixed her love of medicine, science, and Chinese history through translations from the Chinese classic Journey to the West. Detailing diagnoses and medications, she brought a difficult-to-read adventure to new light. “This gave me a deep read into various medical cultures, something that will help me on my path to being a physician.”

Hunter Isenstein

Critical Theory & Social Justice
Hunter’s project examined the intersection of critical disability studies and deaf studies, aiming to unravel the exclusivity and ableism prevalent in the deaf community. Through this lens, Hunter found materiality, affect, and loss to be crucial elements in expanding and empowering both deaf culture and disability studies.

Social Sciences

Grace Luu

Economics
When a hospital closes, neighboring hospitals are tasked with treating additional patients, and patients face increased travel time. Utilizing economic theory and complex data sources, Grace’s senior comps project aimed to estimate the spillover effects of hospital closure on inpatient mortality.

Zoey Solomon

Urban and Environmental Policy
Zoey researched how the privatization of affordable housing affected tenants in New York City, traveling there with help from an Anderson grant to create a documentary that features tenant interviews and personal archival footage. “Being able to talk to a wide range of tenants helped me understand the breadth of experiences that can exist, even within one apartment building.”

Leela Cullity

Leela Cullity

Diplomacy & World Affairs
Exploring the construction of Canada’s national identity as "humanitarian," Leela used a specific asylum law called the Internal Flight Alternative to understand how violence on the Canadian border is invisibilized. She analyzed 715 recent asylum cases to determine if this law was applied consistently. “In reading these cases, I learned how many legal loopholes exist to deport individuals who have a right to asylum.”

Sciences

Danielle Jonas-Delson

Cognitive Science
Danielle argued that the relationship between land and language in Indigenous communities can explain the correlation between geographic areas of high linguistic diversity and high biodiversity. “By connecting language, culture, and ecology, I emphasized that protecting linguistic diversity is integral to ensuring the survival of species, which is key to keeping Indigenous languages and worldviews alive.”

Shayne Klisura

Geology
Shayne obtained Apatite (U-Th)/He analyses, an isotopic method for determining the thermal history of geologic materials, along a NW-SE transect of the Garlock fault in the Tejon Ranch Conservancy to better understand the late-stage uplift and exhumation of California’s Tehachapi Mountains. “The work was very challenging, but just as rewarding and it gave me valuable research experience to use in graduate school.”

Miriam Aguilar

Computer Science
With the objective of creating an educational tool that bridges the knowledge gap and alleviates apprehension, Miriam developed a virtual reality PC Builder that introduces novice users to the basics of computer assembly. Through guided, step-by-step instructions, users can interact with virtual components such as the CPU, RAM, GPU, and motherboard, simulating installation movements using VR technology.