Honors College Core Curriculum

Freshman core is the foundation of the honors experience. This formative, five-credit class meets four days a week. You will be reading for all and writing for most of those days. Freshman core is meant to challenge you and expand your mind through an immersive experience based on some of the core questions.

Freshman core represents about one third of our students' course work during their first year and is taken in the fall and spring semesters. This interdisciplinary course combines the study of literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, geography, sociology, and the fine arts with emphasis on values inquiry and the skills of critical and synthetic thinking, writing, and problem solving. A team of experienced honors faculty will guide you.

The fine arts component of the honors core course will bring directors, musicians, artists, and writers into your classroom for pre-performance talks. You'll find the fine arts here are not just icing on the cake, but are integral to finding meaningful answers to the core questions.

• Unit A: What is the difference between belief and knowledge?

• Unit B: How do we discern the good from the bad?

• Unit C: How do we understand art?

• Unit D: How do we create and use the past?

Each question is followed by a final one: What, therefore, should we do?

You will be reading and questioning primary sources: Plato, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Martin Luther King, Virginia Woolf, Chaucer, and others...discussing and debating them freely with the faculty and with each other.

The questions we explore are ones no one can answer for you. A scientist will answer some of these questions differently than an artist, a business executive differently than a philosopher, but all should be able to articulate, explain, and support their positions. We teach you how to do this skillfully and give you lots of opportunities to practice it in your core classes.

Whatever your skill upon entering, you will emerge from the freshman year a greatly improved writer and speaker, able to confidently handle future challenges. Your improved communication skills and ability to solve problems as part of a team will prepare you for the toughest advanced classes or internships.

The core course and your honors experience don't end after the first year. We think it's a real advantage of our program that it continues for three years and is followed with experiential learning, such as an internship.

In the spring semester of your sophomore year, you will take the "science core," which combines the study of social and natural sciences, including biology, psychology, chemistry, and anthropology. You will draw upon the critical and synthetic thinking skills from the first year to contemplate and analyze two more core questions:

• Unit E: Why does science matter?

• Unit F: What does it mean to be human?

And, once again, those questions will be followed with: What, therefore, should we do?

You might elect to add some other sophomore-level university honors classes to your schedule such as Composition II, Educational Psychology, and Probability and Statistics, perhaps in the fall semester.

While most students take the science core in their sophomore year, it is possible to take it in the spring semester of your junior year if needed.

You'll revisit the humanities and social sciences in the fall of your junior year to answer two final honors core class questions:

• Unit G: How do we understand the sacred?

• Unit H: Must the need for social order conflict with the need for individual liberty?

These questions follow with: What, therefore, should we do?

You'll also become more involved in advanced coursework in your major. Some departments offer honors courses and programs. This is a great time to start thinking about writing an undergraduate thesis or planning a senior project.

This is also a great time to do an internship or study abroad for a semester or a whole year. Because we believe that these external experiences are so vital to your education, we allow the junior core sequence to be flexible. If you want to study abroad or intern during your junior year, you can postpone junior core until your senior year.

Seniors who have for whatever reason missed one of the previous core classes can take any of the four Honors Core courses during their final year. Otherwise, we leave the senior year open as students begin to apply for jobs, apply for admission to graduate schools, and finish up the coursework for their majors.