What would be the most important task for undergraduates in their last year? Perhaps, it is writing a good thesis. To strengthen the support for thesis writing, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has been holding an award ceremony for outstanding theses since 2011.

 In 2020, the award ceremony, which encourages and compliments students with outstanding theses, was held on February 7. In total, 15 awardees, including graduates for August 2019 and prospective graduates for February 2020, were recommended from each major. Among the candidates, the awardee whose thesis was published in a SCI-indexed academic journal was awarded the cash prize of 1,000,000 won, and the remaining 14 were awarded 200,000 won each. In the award ceremony, a total number of 35 people participated including the dean, the deputy head, directors of departments, and awardees. The following contains snippets of the interview with an awardee, Yeon-Jeong Lee of Crop Science and Biotechnology Major, whose thesis was published in an SCI-registered academic journal:

 The graduate thesis by the awardee Yeon-Jeong Lee, “Production of Molecular Marker for Liriope Muscari Chloroplast Genome-wide Completion and Classification with Ophiopogon Japonicus Ker-Gawier,” contains the contents of developing a molecular marker classifying Liriope Muscari with Ophiopogon japonicus Ker-Gawier, an allied specie of Liriope Muscari by using chloroplast genome-wide information. The Introduction to Crops Genomics course she attended as a junior undergraduate influenced her decision to select this topic. She stated that she was interested in the technology analyzing complicated plant genomes and in identifying the evolving process of plants and their overall industrial utilization.

 Lee also said that her activities as a research student proved to be extremely beneficial during her thesis preparation and in the process of SCI registration. “I was able to satisfy my curiosity by experiencing experimental processes, and I received lots of practical help from the professor as an expert in this field, and seniors in the research lab, as I learned directly from them. I learned many aspects that I had not known, including journals that I could publish my thesis in, or the thesis format required by each journal, and the ways to collect and interpret the resulting data, etc. Also, since writing a thesis requires me to collect and understand data myself, if I had conducted the research by myself, it would have taken several times longer than the time I actually spent.” She added that she is continuing her studies as a graduate student of the class of ‘20 in the Lab. Of Functional Plants' led by Professor Tae-Jin Yang, with whom she has worked on her research and graduation thesis.

 The school administration office, which took charge of awarding the outstanding thesis award, congratulated all awardees at this time and delivered an encouraging message wishing that more students preparing theses with outstanding research would emerge. In addition, they stated that they are planning to continuously encourage preparation of theses by students through the outstanding thesis award.