If I have a topic name and an approximate year, is it possible to look up an undergraduate thesis written at a military service academy?
If the service academies have the same sort of undergrad thesis practices as most other post-secondary institutions, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to look it up.
Undergrad theses, at least in my field (history), are generally treated like longer and more complicated term papers. That is, they are graded and returned to the students. In some cases, the department itself might keep a copy for posterity (probably more usual now that keeping electronic versions is so easy), but i’ve never seen such copies indexed or cataloged, nor made searchable in the library.
My undergrad thesis is, i believe, sitting on a shelf gathering dust somewhere in the history department at my undergrad university. If someone wanted to see it, they could probably go to the department itself and ask to take a look. But there’s no way they could look it up online or anything like that. If you want to see an undergrad thesis, i think your best best is to get in touch with the department or school at the academy where it was done, and ask them if they keep copies.
It is conceivable, if the field of study is physics, computer science, mathematics, or possibly chemistry, that it’s been posted to arXiv. (Here’s a few such theses.) It’s also conceivable that it was submitted to ProQuest, though I’m confident that at least 99% of their thesis archiving is for graduate work. Your best bet is most likely to contact the department where the thesis was written.
At my university, you had to submit an additional copy for posterity, and that copy was archived by the department.
If you had do this same procedure, it is likely that the department you wrote it for will know how to find it – but you would have to contact them. If you don’t remember a requirement to submit an archive copy, it was probably treated as a term paper as said above - graded and returned to you.
I’m not sure about the undergraduate level, but graduate theses and doctoral dissertations are normally retained in perpetuity by the school library. I, on a lark, browsed through old theses one time, and they were all Masters or Doctoral level work.
Why don’t you call the school library and ask? Be sure to emphasize “undergraduate” when you ask, or else they may think you meant graduate theses or doctoral dissertations and simply refer you a dusty shelf that doesn’t have what you want.
Nowdays, for doctoral dissertations, you can actually search for them online using the Dissertation Abstracts database. It’s a subscription service, but just about every university library has a subscription. And for most dissertations produced in the last 15-20 years, you can download free PDF copies.
When I did my dissertation 30 years ago a copy was sent to University Microfilms in Ann Arbor where it was put on microfilm and was available. The university library also got a copy.
My Masters thesis was made into a departmental report. Maybe my bachelors thesis got archived, but I doubt it. Every EE major at MIT had to do one, and they probably added up really quickly.
How old is it?
About five or six years old, I think.