Honors Courses

Honors-designated course sections are smaller, often more “hands-on” offerings of traditional classes. Although contingent on the semester, past offerings have included Advanced Composition, General Psychology, General Sociology, and University Library and Research Skills.

Current sections can be found here.

Honors-only colloquium are taught by our Faculty Fellows, who apply to teach classes that are both interdisciplinary and represent the highest level of engaged learning. Our fellows also are active in their scholarship or creative work, bringing this advanced level of expertise to their classes. Past topics have included terrorism, women and crime, Middle Eastern geopolitics, health behavioral change, Shakespeare, and visual arts.

Current sections can be found here.

The Honors Project truly represents UCM’s mission of “opportunity in action,” particularly in the way it exemplifies engaged learning. The process of working one-on-one with a faculty mentor in all phases of the process, from topic creation to the final product, is an undertaking that forever impacts a student’s collegiate experience. In fact, research finds this type of engagement significantly increases desirable student outcomes, such as higher GPAs (Sell, Naginey, & Alexander, 2018) and graduation rates (Nerio et al., 2019), particularly for underrepresented students (Carpi et al., 2017; Hernandez et al., 2018). Participation in undergraduate research and/or creative endeavors also prepares students for life after college, another pillar of UCM’s mission, including graduate school and employment opportunities (Miller, Roconi, and Dumford, 2018).

Honors projects come in all formats and represent all disciplines, but universally exemplify the cumulation of your studies at UCM. We are here to support you as you advance through the process and as such, have created several resources to help with your project development.

1. Please review our FAQs here. This will take you through every step from the proposal to the final assessment.
2. Access our archive here of past exemplar projects as organized by major. This is intended to give students an idea of what the final product looks like.
3. Attend a Developing an Honors Project session, where students will be able to view past projects and hear directly from Dr. Carson, the Coordinator of Undergraduate Research, on the process.
4. Set up an appointment with Dr. Carson at any time during the process for individualized help. Dr. Carson is also available virtually via Google Meet, which is part of your UCM Gsuite. We are here to help!
5. Check out a list of active faculty-student projects and research-related events on campus for further brainstorming.