2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas

Turn inspirations into your passion project.

This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

People working on laptops
Linguistics

Confession and Camouflage: On Saying What's Hardest to Say

My favorite subject to teach is the novels of Thomas Mann, who had to find artful and sometimes sneaky ways to talk about forbidden subjects, most of all his own queerness. We can look at how writers and artists "say without saying" the things that they most need to express but are most afraid to say--and how we, as critics, often do the same thing!

Music, Philosophy, Linguistics

R.J
R.J

What is knowledge and what is it good for?

What is knowledge? What is the value of knowing something? How should answers to these questions inform our practice of explaining people's actions and animal behaviors by referencing what they know? We will start by familiarizing ourselves with contemporary discussions about the composition and value of knowledge. From there, we can branch out in accord with your interests to investigate such topics as knowledge in non-human animals, knowledge as a social good, or the scientific method as a distinctive way to gain knowledge. Pre-requisites: A curiosity for the role of knowledge in our mental lives is all that's required. We will start with thoughtful columns, podcasts, or videos authored by science communicators and public philosophers and engage with recent research and classic literature where needed.

Linguistics, Cognitive

Arnel Blake
Arnel Blake

The Power of Listening

Have you ever wondered how children are able to learn a new language without taking any classes? No lectures, no flashcards, no textbooks, no quizzes. We all learned how to speak by simply listening to the world around us. The more we understand about human communication, the better we can foster our relationships with each other. Let's talk about language acquisition, and design a research experiment that explores the power of listening.

Music, Linguistics, Cognitive

Chloris
Chloris

Liberatory Pedagogy: Radical and Transformative Ways to Teach and Study the Humanities

One of my greatest joys is exploring how studying the humanities in collaboration with others can build community and address the joys and sorrows of human experience, in ways often avoided in traditional academic settings. Looking to scholars such as bell hooks for inspiration and guidance, we can talk about ways to make the humanities more serviceable to, well, humanity, than they sometimes are on university campuses.

Music, Philosophy, Linguistics

R.J
R.J

Scientific Literature Review

Do you want to know what the scientific literature says about somethingyou are interested in? Let's review the scientific literature to support your project with a review of current research of a topic of your interest.

Neuroscience, Quantitative, Linguistics

Regina
Regina

Role of Stigma in Health and Social Outcomes of Autistic Individuals

In this project, we will explore the role stigma may play in health and/or social outcomes of autistic individuals. Much work in autism focuses a lot on the perspectives of researchers and/or caregivers and not much on the lived experiences of autistic individuals (although this is starting to gradually increase). Given that many autistic individuals report poorer healthcare outcomes, this project is interested in exploring the role stigma might play. This project can focus on either autistic children, adults, or transition youth depending on your interests. We can work together to determine the method of this work (i.e. literature review, survey/questionnaire, documentary, etc) depending on your skillset and interests.

Social, Linguistics

Tobi
Tobi

Bringing Your Story to Life

Storytelling has been around for thousands of years. It's an essential part of being human. In this project, let's bring your story to life, whether it be through film, theatre, song, or any other concept that you have in mind.

Music, Linguistics, Cognitive

Chloris
Chloris

Learning (and coping) strategies in this fast-paced and eventful era

When more than half of our global population was confined to bedrooms and to learn and to work, when online courses and meetings became the norm, when our average human attention span is rapidly shrinking while everything else is booming and luring, how do we keep our focus and keep important information from fading? In this project, you will: - gain comprehensive understanding of attention, memory and learning processes - get to know useful tools and methods (such as mindfulness) in boosting attention, memory and general life satisfaction - Evaluate the validity and reliability of certain intervention-based studies that trying to promote/demote certain practices - conduct interviews and/or questionnaires on one or several of the tools and methods we have discussed

Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive

Elaine
Elaine

Sociolinguistics: A Dialectic Investigation

Conduct a study in sociolinguistics—who speaks how and why? In this project, we will learn how to scientifically observe the speech patterns of those around us and uncover some possible social, political, and historical reasons why. No prerequisites in linguistics required—only an inquisitive mind and an eager ear!

Creative Writing, Linguistics

Kira
Kira

Literally speaking, how figurative are we?

When it comes to metaphors and other figures of speech, people generally equate them with some artistic talents that are shared only among poets and writers. Not to mention, some tend to believe that rhetorical devices are at best useless ornamental pieces scattered here and there to beautify one's language, or worse yet, deviant twists of tongues insidiously lead the recipients astray. But hold on a sec! Did I just unintentionally left a full trace of metaphors as I'm typing down these words? Isn't "equate" a metaphor - mapping maths values to general ideas? Isn't "scatter" a metaphor - mapping candies to words? Isn't "astray" a metaphor still - mapping a physical path to a mental path? It turned out, figuration (especially metaphor) might as well be a fundamental mechanism of human cognition! In this project, you will: - experience the magic of "Conceptual Metaphor Theory", a powerful and still developing theory in Cognitive Linguistics - gather evidences and examples of "metaphors of our mind" in linguistic data, cultural and social artifacts - Carry out a corpus study OR a discourse analysis based on arguments for or against "Conceptual metaphor

Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive

Elaine
Elaine

Sentiment Analysis: Twitter Data and Market Shifts

Analyzing tone and sentiment of prominent political and industry figures as they correlate with market movements, based on company and industry-specific tweet content.

Computer Science, Linguistics, AI/ML

Evan
Evan

Social Media and NLP

Study data from social media to better understand how, when and why do people change their opinions (e.g. about immigration, globalization).

Linguistics

Dora
Dora

Critical Humanities Study of Your Choice

We can design and carry out together a project on anything in the humanities that interests you. Though I'm mainly a scholar of literature, philosophy, and music, we can work on anything in the humanities that interests you.

Music, Philosophy, Linguistics

R.J
R.J

Literary or Philosophical Analysis--Project of Your Choice!

Critical reading of any text that sparks your interest.

Music, Philosophy, Linguistics

R.J
R.J

What are games good for?

``Common sense'' wisdom alleges that games are a waste of time, if not a social ill. Playing games allegedly weakens our character and stymies our goals. Social media platforms allegedly ruined political discourse by turning them into games. In contrast, some sciences and their associated philosophies value games as vehicles for exploring and explaining their subject matter. Economists and ecologists often ``model'' certain behaviors as optimal strategies for winning games with certain pay-off structures. Linguists often ``model'' types of conversations as ``language games'' with distinctive goals, rules, and scoreboards. But are games good for their own sake? Is there a characteristic good or value to ``just playing a game''? Together we'll look at discussions by artists, game designers, and philosophers about how games comprise a distinctive artform valuable for their own sake. From there, we'll branch out in accord with your interests. Whichever way we go, we'll strive for a deeper philosophical understanding of just what it is games are good for. Pre-requisites: A curiosity for what makes games, arts, or scientific explanations special is all that's required. We will start with thoughtful columns, podcasts, or videos authored by science communicators and public philosophers and engage with recent research where needed.

Linguistics, Cognitive

Arnel Blake
Arnel Blake

Politeness

Study how politeness, kindness and other behavioral phenomena are expressed differently across languages (e.g. English vs Mandarin Chinese), by using large-scale datasets.

Linguistics

Dora
Dora

Detecting bots on Twitter

Now that computers are good enough to generate very convincing text completely on their own, people have become quite concerned about "fake news". In this project, we will investigate how easy it is to detect Tweets that have been written by computers in four steps: 1) Collect some data, some possibly labelled already as "fake". 2) Look at the statistical properties of "real" Tweets versus "fake" Tweets. 3) Write a computer program, for example a Naive Bayes classifier, for labelling new Tweets as "real" or "fake". 4) Evaluate how good the program is using a sensible metric.

Math, Linguistics, AI/ML

Clayton
Clayton

Research Proposal

Looking to get approval or even some funding towards a project you're passionate about? Together, we will work through the steps to developing a strong proposal, including researching existing literature, developing research questions or project goals, and devising a timeline and/or budget. We will also discuss persuasive writing strategies and adapting writing to institutional contexts.

Languages, Linguistics

Rachel
Rachel

Explore slang trends in twitter corpora

Slang is rapidly changing, and may vary a lot depending on the age/gender/community of the speaker. The student will extract tweets from Twitter and explore trends in slang use over time. The student, through this project, can get an introduction into basic text analysis/processing techniques.

Computer Science, Languages, Linguistics

Jennifer
Jennifer

Beyoncé as Poetry? Street Performance as Prose?

Rap. Movies. Musicals. That street performer who jumped over your head. Writing does not just mean a poem by a white man from the 1800s. Writing is the accordion player on the subway. The giggling baby dancing in a snow suit. Through this project we'll uncover how words show up in our everyday surroundings through (non?)fiction and poetry, using as many artistic mediums as you wish.

Creative Writing, Linguistics

Amanda
Amanda