Honors Program

For Faculty

What opportunities are there for faculty to be involved in the Honors Program?

Many! Here are a few to get you started: 

  1. You can volunteer to come to the Honors Workshop and talk to students about your research program. One of the workshop goals is to enhance an understanding of interdisciplinary and the perspectives that different disciplines bring to a single topic. Hence, we need a spectrum of presenters over the course of each semester. Interested? E-mail: James Canning.
  2. You can volunteer to come for a Pizza & Prof evening on the Honors Housing floor in the residence hall. Students will join in an informal setting to hear from faculty about some area of interest or fun, not necessarily academic at all. We hope to give our students a sense of the personal side of academic lives to foster connection and engagement, and so that they can begin to picture themselves in such a position. Contact Alex Ruthmann if you are interested.
  3. You can represent your department on the Honors Council. Each department has a liaison on the Council who is appointed or elected at the department's discretion.
  4. You can encourage students who do particularly well in your classes to find out about the Honors Program and consider joining it. 
  5. You can teach an Honors Section or an Honors Course. You might also announce at the beginning of each class that students in the Honors Program wishing to take the class for Honors credit by contract should contact you as soon as possible. It helps to have the additional honors experiences clear in your own mind so that you can discuss them with students who might not have as much of a sense of the particulars with regard to your course. Remember that Honors-by-Contract forms, complete with the syllabus for honors by contract credit, must be submitted to the Honors Office by the end of the drop-add period. 
  6. You can mentor a student who is thinking about an Honors Thesis or Project. Encourage him or her to plan ahead and to allow sufficient time (for many students two semesters is preferable to one) to complete the work, present it publicly, submit it to the committee for approval and revisions, and get it into the Honors Office. 
  7. You can supervise a student's Honors Thesis or Project either as the project advisor or as a committee member. 
  8. You can think about applying for the position of Honors Director when it's time for a change.