Senior Comps

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:

Social Sciences

Matthew Uytioco

Economics

Matthew’s research project examined whether building more affordable housing through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program helps integrate neighborhoods over time. By combining detailed census data with the locations of new affordable housing developments, he compares neighborhood demographics before and after these projects are built to understand LIHTC's impact.

Mary Clare Jones

Sociology

Mary Clare examined the experiences of school mental health staff in rural communities across the U.S. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews, her research revealed how bureaucratic constraints, economic disparities, and the work’s emotional demands compound the complexity of these roles. By highlighting these challenges, her study underscores the need for greater policy attention and funding to support mental health services in rural public schools.

Clay Carson

Diplomacy & World Affairs

Clay applied a global political economy perspective to research U.S. universities with branch campuses abroad, a topic of personal interest since applying to college himself. His project used a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative and qualitative data to frame internationally reaching universities as distinctive actors in the world economy.

Arts & Humanities

Mickayla (MJ) Jones

Critical Theory & Social Justice

MJ’s project, “Burn the Laughing Barrel: Reforming the Black Culture Industry,” examines the commodification of Black cultural expression. She argues that ownership alone is not enough to change this system and instead calls for structural changes to the way culture is produced, distributed, and valued. Through this work, she reimagines Black media as a space for historical memory, creativity, and community accountability.

Sean Janairo

Music (Production)

In addition to a complementary paper, Sean wrote, recorded, mixed, and mastered an album that aims to capture moments of reflection during travel. Each song tells a story represented by a different mode of transportation. The lyrics reflect on the role physical distance plays in our relationships and sense of home, focusing on how we try to bridge those gaps through these modes of movement.

Jacqueline Pichardo

Group Language

Jacqui analyzed the relationship between cultural identity and linguistic expression by studying how Spaniards and Mexican Spanish speakers express and perceive politeness and humor. Drawing on her experience as a native Mexican Spanish speaker who studied abroad in Salamanca, Spain, she identified differences in how each culture understands respect and humor, revealing a form of code-switching even within the same language.

Sciences

Isaac Ochoa

Mathematics

Isaac conducted original research in the area of group theory. Symmetry is a recurring motif in art and the natural world, and in mathematics, the study of symmetry can be cast in the language of abstract objects known as groups. His project focused on constructing and classifying certain groups which describe their own collection of symmetries.

Naomi Bahn-Logan

Computer Science

“The Ants: Evoking Emotion Through Interactive Digital Storytelling” is an interactive adaptation of “Leiningen vs the Ants” by Carl Stephenson. Naomi developed the interactive experience and conducted a user study, combining this project with research on horror media and interactive storytelling to explore techniques for heightening fear and tension, and for deepening emotional engagement in interactive media design.

Ian Terell

Chemistry

Ian researches synthetic methods for producing pharmaceutically relevant molecules using novel chemical reactions. His comps project centered around recent developments in synthetic “molecular motor” design. He focused on the work of Dr. David Leigh, who produced, optimized, and applied the very first catalytically driven molecular rotor. This rotor catalytically transduced chemical energy into mechanical work when incorporated into a gel.

Senior Comps

What project will you pursue?

Social Sciences

Arts & Humanities

Sciences

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