Woodbury’s Honors Program offers students immersive classroom experiences, augmented by participation in live events and service to the community, which are interdisciplinary and focused on opportunities to collaborate with faculty on their research and creative interests. The program exposes students to graduate-level courses in small contexts of one unit each, while emphasizing a diverse range of topics. Courses are open to all students in all majors across the university and taught by faculty drawn from all the schools.
Honors Program students hone their skills in critical thinking, inquiry and analysis, integrative learning, cultural competence, community service, and creative problem solving through an enriched curriculum that encourages them to explore their values and engage in a range of diverse experiences. Ultimately, this is an educational opportunity focused on transforming students into scholars and citizens of the world.
One of the heartening consequences of the university’s response to both the global pandemic and the social protest movements in 2020-2021 is that it began to create event programming and think about curricular design in more intentional ways, meant to engage students, faculty, and staff who were isolated and staying at home. Both curricular and co-curricular opportunities became nimble and responsive to these urgent circumstances by opening up dialogue and discussion around diverse topics. Courses in the Honors Program offer deep, rather than broad, exposure to a focused topic, and the topics are timely and creative, reflecting an integrative approach to various fields of study and modes of thinking.
The Honors Program envisions offering two or three HONR courses per semester, designed around faculty members’ passion projects and current research. These courses aim to offer generative experiences to students, intended to kickstart their own intellectual curiosity and theoretical investigations. Our pilot courses delivered in spring 2021 and fall 2021 courses can be found here.
Taking courses in the Honors Program is open to any student. To enroll in the program and work toward the certificate, a student must have a GPA of 3.0 and have earned at least 30 credit units at Woodbury (15 units for transfer students). Application to the program is on a rolling basis.
When a student completes the requirements of the Honors Program, then they will graduate with a certificate designating that affiliation. Such a degree makes them much more competitive on the job market or in the application process for graduate school. However, enrolling in the Honors Program is separate from the traditional university honorifics of cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude, which are entirely dependent on a student’s overall GPA.
Faculty are excited to teach in the Honors Program because these courses represent an opportunity to share research interests with students that are often too particular or idiosyncratic to include in regular survey courses, even in upper divisions. These courses provide the context for a mentorship role to develop between faculty and students that can lead students to pursue creative and intellectually rigorous projects of their own.
Last Updated on May 24, 2021.