Honors Program

The Hood Honors Program is a learning community of highly engaged students united in their passion for interdisciplinary education in a global context and empowered to shape their own academic journey.

Our Honors Program is highly selective, admitting a limited number of outstanding students across all majors each year. Students form a diverse, inclusive and supportive learning community through a four-year series of seminars, co-curricular activities and social events based in the classroom and Honors Suite and supplemented by numerous off-campus excursions.

Classes are seminar style, with an emphasis on discussion and critical thinking. Testing is de-emphasized in favor of writing and collaborative projects.

• Engaging – You will help shape your own education through interactive discussions and interdisciplinary experiences both inside and outside the classroom.
• Inspiring – Through your interactions with your peers, the faculty, and the local and global community, you will be introduced to new ideas, ways of thinking, and directions.
• Empowering – You and your peers will overcome challenges to make a real and lasting impact on your community.

Our students:

• Love learning and are ready to make the most of their college experience
• Want to confront new challenges
• Are eager to build a community within the Honors program with their peers and faculty
• Believe in sharing their talents to benefit others
• Learn to confront the complexities of difference and diversity
• Want to take on leadership roles to create change

Benefits of Honors:

While the financial award is significant and the recognition on your transcript upon graduation from the program is gratifying, if you’ve read this far you already know that the benefits of joining the Hood College Honors Program go far beyond the tangible. You also get:

Flexibility – Honors gives you choices. Every student at Hood completes the core curriculum. The required Honors seminars give you “wild cards” to use to satisfy Hood’s core curriculum requirements. So, participating in Honors gives you greater flexibility in deciding which core classes to take and which core requirements to satisfy by counting your Honors classes instead. This lets you tailor your core experience to your own interests. Beyond the required seminar classes during your first and second years, you choose how you would like to satisfy the program’s upper-level elective requirements in your third and fourth years from a variety of options—including study abroad and Departmental Honors options.

Student Engagement – Spend your classroom hours with other students who are inquisitive and passionate about learning through meaningful discussion and hands-on activities. Honors students have more opportunities to extend learning beyond the classroom with class and program field trips.

Student Input – Your ideas and opinions count! You have a voice in both the social and academic aspects of the program. Students help select topics for seminars, destinations for program trips and social activities for all Honors students and their guests.

Christine P. Tischer Honors Center – The Honors Center is the physical center of the Honors Program in Blazer Hall. Drop in any time day or night for drinks, snacks or a different study environment. Stop in for a chat with fellow Honors students on Monday mornings for coffee and donuts. Study, watch movies in the lounge, play board games or just hang out—it’s all there for you.

Community – Perhaps most important, you will be part of a vibrant intellectual and social community, a group of peers and friends who will form a supportive foundation for your time at Hood and beyond.

Honors Diversity and Inclusion

The Hood College Honors Program supports and values inclusive excellence by promoting educational equity and non-discriminatory practices. As leaders of a learning community, it is our responsibility to promote the inclusion and success of academically motivated and high-potential learners from all backgrounds, understanding that each of us holds varied, intersectional identities. We make inclusive excellence possible by understanding that differences between and among us are strengths. In response to historical, cultural, and institutional restrictions that have limited student access to honors education and the hiring of diverse faculty and staff, the Hood Honors Program is committed to modeling best practices in inclusion, and to using inclusive leadership strategies, research, and partnerships with other departments and organizations to pursue honors practices that serve and empower all communities.