Honors Courses

Honors students have access to three distinct types of curriculum offerings: (1) honors-designated course sections, (2) honors-only colloquia, and (3) the honors project.

 

Honors-Designated General Education Course Sections

Honors-designated general education course sections are smaller and  more “hands-on." Faculty apply to teach these honors-only classes and are selected based on the course's experiential learning components, ability to challenge high achieving students, and appeal to a wide variety of majors. Although contingent on the semester, offerings for 2023-2024 include History of the Modern World, Basic Genetics, American Government, Art History Survey, and Introduction to Geology.

Current section descriptions can be found here.

 

Honors-Only Colloquium (HONR 3000)

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 Psychology of Time, Women and Crime, Middle Eastern: Culture and Geopolitics, Forensic Psychology of Witness ID, Shakespeare and Nature, Famous/Infamous Missourians, The Holocaust in the Media, and Harry Truman: His Life & Times.

Current sections can be found here.

 

The Honors Project (HONR 4000)

The Honors Project exemplifies engaged learning through 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 document 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 department. This is intended to give students an idea of what the final product looks like.
3. Attend an Honors College professional development event, where students will be able to view past projects and hear directly from Dr. Goldstein, the Assistant Director of the Honors College, on the process.
4. Set up an appointment with Dr. Goldstein at any time during the process for individualized help. Dr. Goldstein 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.