Honors Program
The Honors Program is an enrichment program, providing a more stimulating intellectual climate or community for our brightest and most motivated students.
The Honors Program itself offers no scholarships, but nearly all students in Honors have some sort of scholarship from the University – Presidential Scholarships and National Merit Scholarships are most common – and all have a certain grade point average which must be achieved if they are to keep their awards.
Of the roughly 30 first-year students admitted to Honors every year, perhaps one or two lose their scholarships, but the reason for that has nothing to do with their two-credit Honors seminar; rather, it has everything to do with Calculus II or Organic Chemistry or some other bear of a course, or because they're having trouble adjusting to the freedom college offers, or because of personal issues unrelated to academics. Alfred's Honors Program is unique in that Honors seminars do not fulfill any general education requirement – we do not offer Honors English or Honors math, for example.
Seminars on our campus are taken as overloads, that is, in addition to a student's normal course load, and faculty understand that the purpose of Honors is to add what might be called "intellectual play" to a student's life. Since many Honors students have two majors, or a major and several minors, our faculty try to design Honors seminars which are interesting and challenging without significantly increasing student’s workloads.
The level of difficulty varies; if you join Honors you might think of it as the kind of commitment you would make for another activity, like working on the newspaper or being in a play, except that this is an intellectual activity. Seminars meet one night a week for an hour and forty minutes.
The Honors Program is an enrichment program, providing a more stimulating intellectual climate or community for our brightest and most motivated students.
