Rebecca Bryson Kissinger Thesis Award Winners and Mentors

About the “Becky” Award

The Bryson-Kissinger family established the Rebecca Bryson-Kissinger Memorial Award in 2000 to honor the memory of our former faculty colleague, who for many years served as the Psychology Department’s Graduate Adviser. The award, affectionately known as the “Becky,” is given to the Master’s student in the Department of Psychology whose thesis has been selected as the best from among those submitted during that academic year. The winner will receive a $500 award.

In the summer of each year a committee of the faculty reviews the theses submitted, and selects the thesis that should receive the award. In order for a thesis to be considered for this award, the student must be registered in the Master’s Program in the Department of Psychology at SDSU for the academic year in which the award is presented.  The thesis need not have been defended at the time of submission.

Submission materials include three PDF documents that are emailed to the chair of the review committee: (1) a copy of the thesis, (2) a letter of support from the thesis committee chair, and (3) a 3 to 5 page, double spaced summary of the thesis. The submission deadline is typically about the middle of August.

The review committee uses the following criteria in reviewing the theses.
1. Originality of idea vs. extension of others’ work
2. Ability to conceptualize question under study
3. Quality of experimental design and methodology
4. Degree of effort required to collect or access data
5. Quality of writing
6. Appropriateness of statistics and their interpretation
7. Understanding of and success in communicating the importance of the research/contribution to society
8. Difficulty of acquiring knowledge and facility with techniques for performing research
9. Degree to which students worked independently on developing the research question, designing and implementing research, analyzing data and writing thesis.