Curriculum

Honors students complete a minimum of 18 credits in Honors courses, and meet special requirements in mathematics and foreign language. The Honors curriculum’s six components are divided into lower and upper division studies:

Lower Division

All lower-division Honors courses can be counted toward General Education requirements.

• An Honors-level course in English composition.*
• The Honors First Year Seminar, an exploration of how knowledge is constructed and communicated with emphases on the uses of language and technology.*
  *These requirements are waived for advanced students.
• Four 200-level courses.
  Recent offerings include:
  Eastern Influence on Western Art
  The History of Eugenics
  Shapers of the Seventeenth Century
  Imagining Mars
  Melancholia: A Cultural History
  Language and Power
• The completion, through course work, placement test, or other evidence, of pre-calculus or statistics and two years of foreign language, OR calculus and one year of foreign language.

Upper Division

• The Honors Program Junior Colloquium, ideally taken in the second semester of the junior year. Through a multidisciplinary engagement with a specific topic and through the presentations of guest speakers, the colloquium builds the skills necessary to the research process; it prepares the students for the tasks they will encounter in their senior year as they write their thesis.

• The Senior Project, normally undertaken in the student’s major department, which earns the student Honors in the major while also satisfying Honors Program requirements. The Program encourages the presentation of such projects at national and state-wide conferences on undergraduate research.

The University Honors Program is accredited as a Commonwealth Honors Program by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education.