Anyone who has ever completed a senior thesis project knows that it’s stressful and time-consuming AF – but if you want to graduate with honors or make yourself look super impressive to grad schools, it’s a must at most universities. And one senior found an amazing way to make his totally not boring and still pull off that A.
Obasi Shaw, a Harvard University senior, submitted his senior thesis in the English Department as a rap album called “Liminal Minds,” which the Washington Post reports he received a grade of A- on. Obviously, he will now have no problem graduating with honors.
The lyrics on the 10-track album discuss what it means to be black in America. According to Shaw, “Liminal Minds” looks at the way modern race relations are connected to the past and how we often “compartmentalize” our understanding of black history. Each song is written from a different character’s point of view, an idea Shaw says he drew from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
“Some people don’t consider rap a high art form,” Shaw told the Harvard Gazette. “But poetry and rap are very similar. Rhyming poems were very common in old English poetry.”
The album covers everything from slavery, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to segregation, to Barack Obama.
Shaw apparently got the idea from his mother, who suggested he record an album as a creative thesis after he’d already been writing and performing his own raps on campus. He then wrote and recorded the project in Harvard’s on-campus recording studio in just over a year.
While Shaw already has plans to move to Seattle to work for Google (he clearly has the whole “doing it all” thing covered), he says he plans to offer the album up for free online, and it definitely sounds like he wouldn’t necessarily hate it if it got him noticed by the music industry.