Colby Liberal Arts Symposium
CLAS
The Colby Liberal Arts Symposium (CLAS) brings the Colby community together each year to recognize and celebrate student scholarship.
Contact
About
The Colby Liberal Arts Symposium (CLAS) is a celebration of student scholarship. Classes are canceled on Thursday (April 27) so that the full Colby community can participate. CLAS 2023 featured the work of over 600 separate Colby students, who presented over 400 separate projects. CLAS is among the largest, if not the largest, undergraduate research symposia of any liberal arts college in the country.
CLAS was created (by faculty vote) in 2014 to extend the positive impact of its predecessor—the Colby Undergraduate Research Symposium (CURS). Following an extended pandemic pause (2020-22), CLAS is resuming as one of Colby’s beloved annual traditions.
Traditionally, events begin on Wednesday evening with Arts@CLAS, a celebration of the arts, in the Colby Museum of Arts. The museum resonates with music, poetry, language readings, visual arts, and dance from many student presenters and performers. Arts@CLAS was temporarily suspended in 2023 as we prepared for the transition to the Gordon Center for the Performing Arts.
On Thursday, classes are canceled so faculty, staff, and students can attend CLAS. In addition to student posters and presentations, the day features a set of wild-card sessions with interdisciplinary topics and creative formats, the Phi Beta Kappa speech contest at noon, and CLAS Highlights—an end-of-day culmination. This year, CLAS Highlights will take the form of PowerPoint Karaoke as four Colby faculty members compete to deliver PowerPoint decks that they have never seen; their improvisational skills will be on full display.
As an extension of CLAS, the final two weeks of the term also include Open CLAS sessions during regular class times. Students will make classroom presentations that are open to the public.
CLAS by the numbers:
CLAS 2023:
- 635 separate students presenting
- 74 CLAS sessions (66 on Thursday, 8 Open CLAS)
- 422 projects
- 245 Oral Presentations
- 162 Posters
- 15 Open CLAS
- Note: These strong numbers came even after a 3-year hiatus.
- We have not yet found an undergraduate research symposium that has as many students or as many projects.
Schedule–CLAS 2023
SCHEDULE OF PROJECTS:
The following schedules are comprehensive and dynamic, meaning that they include all the individual projects (and students) as well as the most recent changes that have been made inside the CLAS system. (You can search for a friend by using CTRL-F on any of these schedules.)
CLAS 2023 Oral Presentation Schedule
Open CLAS 2023 Schedule (Note: Open CLAS presentations or posters take place during the final two weeks of the term–often in regular classrooms at regular class times.)
SCHEDULE OF SESSIONS–OVERVIEW:
The following links produce three different views of the CLAS Schedule-at-a-Glance. These schedules simply present the different sessions (rather than the individual projects); also, these schedules are NOT dynamic. They are accurate as of April 20, 2023.
Session Schedule–Graphical (Times and Places)