Honors Program

University Honors Curriculum

The curriculum parallels the Integrative Core with specially designed honors sections and exciting experiential learning opportunities. All Honors courses are composed entirely of Honors students, helping you build your network and strengthen bonds with your peers. This ensures Honors courses are distinct with unique material designed with Honors students in mind. These are seminars that focus on discussion, collaboration, and project-based learning outside of major-specific lectures.

Honors First Year Seminar (FYS) (first year): This course is designed to enhance core academic skills including written and oral communication, analytical and creative thinking, and project-based collaboration. The thematic content of these seminars will vary with each professor (announced in advance), but all HON 110 seminars will feature a major collaborative project, cocurricular learning outside the classroom, and service to the community.

Honors Mission Seminars (third or fourth year): A new addition for Fall 2026, these experiential courses focus on connecting Honors students with alumni, employers, and your own internal well-being. These seminars will focus on the larger picture of a college experience, and prepare you for your chosen career by hearing from and working with industry guest speakers who are experts in their fields. You must complete all three seminars in any order. (Note: These can be substituted for one IC Explorations course)

• HON 210—Honors Mission Seminar: Fulfilling Life
  • Although this generation of students is more aware of issues around wellbeing and more willing to express their struggles in this area, most are not aware of the full range of thought and research on this topic—the topic that is arguably the most crucial for their success in life. This seminar addresses both the process of defining a successful, fulfilling life for oneself and the tools for improving wellbeing.
• HON 220—Honors Mission Seminar: Meaningful Work
  • Two common items on students’ wish lists are 1) to get a better sense of what possible career fields are actually like before spending years doing coursework toward something that may or may not be a good fit, and 2) getting a foot in the door with potential employers through internships and/or networking contacts. Another wish for many students—though they are more reluctant to say it because there is a stigma attached—is to have some help in finding a career path that feels more like a calling than just a job. This seminar addresses all these wishes.
• HON 230—Honors Mission Seminar: Responsible Citizenship
  • This seminar offers students conceptual frameworks for civic life as well as a variety of perspectives and tools to be more effective agents for positive change. It takes citizenship from the general sense of “giving back” and doing one’s patriotic duty towards a more sophisticated understanding of how we can use “the tools of freedom” most effectively in the 21^st century.

Honors Capstone (fourth year): Students engage in collaborative work around a complex issue with real-world applications. They draw upon knowledge, skills and thought processes acquired throughout their educational experience. In recent years, this has included “The Idea of College” and “What is an Educated Person?”

Our curriculum is designed to help you:

• solve complex problems with both creative and analytical thinking
• engage thoughtfully with a broad range of viewpoints
• make considered and empathetic ethical judgments
• write with clarity and eloquence in creative, reflective, analytic, and persuasive forms
• speak engagingly, with confidence, power, and civility
• listen actively, with rhetorical awareness and social-emotional intelligence
• collaborate effectively with others
• engage in knowledge-based reflection on your own abilities, limitations, aspirations, and wellbeing
• articulate and evaluate a variety of approaches to the goal of living a fulfilling life
• develop an informed sense of vocation in the context of a fulfilling life and take steps towards this goal
• act as an informed and effective agent for positive change in local, national, and global communities