Information

  • The Value of Sophomore Honors

    The Honors Program sometimes receives questions about Sophomore Honors, why students should earn it, and whether or not it can hinder their progress toward graduation as an Honors Scholar. The requirements of Sophomore Honors bring students together to better form an intellectual and academic community by creating a shared set of experiences. While students may not all be taking the same courses, commonalities such as UNIV 1784 and core courses create intellectually challenging and engaging opportunities for learning that become a touchstone of the Honors experience. Earning Honors credits together in a shared time frame ensures that students will jointly gain depth in a broad array of academic disciplines. Encouraging widened horizons is also why students must attend a certain amount of Honors events in order to earn Sophomore Honors. This promotes exposure to new topics and provides students with peers with whom they can discuss these topics. The requirement of event attendance creates a space for the pursuit of ideas and interests which may otherwise get lost in the daily schedule of homework and to do lists.

     

    Earning Sophomore Honors includes several benefits. The award is noted on a student’s transcript and is celebrated at the Fall Honors Ceremony every year. This provides the faculty and staff who have mentored students with an opportunity to recognize the students’ hard work at the half-way point of college. Students who complete Sophomore Honors are much more likely to graduate as Honors Scholars.

     

    This is great information to share with students who sometimes don’t understand the relationship between Sophomore Honors and graduation as an Honors Scholar. They’ve heard that they can’t use credits applied to Sophomore Honors requirements to graduate as an Honors Scholar, which is only part of the story. Of the 15 credits a student must earn to fulfill Honors graduation requirements, 12 must:

    A) come from the major or a closely related field,

    B) be at the 2000 level or above, and

    C) be approved by the student’s Honors advisor.

     

    Most Honors students are not taking classes during their first four semesters that fit this description, so the credit they’re applying to Sophomore Honors is rarely credit they could apply to graduation as an Honors Scholar as well. The last three of the required 15 credits may come from a class that was used to fulfill Sophomore Honors, so students do in fact have an opportunity to “double dip” one time. For more information about Sophomore Honors requirements, please click here.

    For more information, contact: Jess Hoffmann at jessamy.hoffmann@uconn.edu

If you have any questions, please contact Anne Kim at 860-486-2998.