At one of our October Honors Advisor Update Sessions, it was asked how advisors could encourage students to remain in the Honors Program. Of course each student’s circumstances are going to be different, but one idea is to make the pathway to graduation as an Honors Scholar in your particular department as clear as possible. Making information readily available about timelines, how to apply to the program, and what needs to be done in order to graduate would give students one place to go to understand step by step what they need to do. Sometimes uncertainty and lack of information can be enough to cause a student who’s on the fence about remaining in Honors to quit.
The Honors Program has information available about applying to Honors, application timelines, general department requirements, graduation timelines, and graduation. We encourage you to point students to our site for this basic information so they can be as up-to-date as possible; however, they'll be interested in hearing the department specifics from you! If you haven't done so already, you could create a new page, update your department's web page, or create a document for sharing with students as a one-stop resource with links to the Honors site that explains the specifics of “How to Graduate as an Honors Scholar in X Department”.
This spring a list of students in each department who are eligible to join the Honors Program as juniors will be sent so that advisors can encourage those students to apply for Honors. This would be a great time to be able to share information with potential Honors students about a clear path they can follow in order to go from application to graduation as an Honors Scholar in your department.
For more information, contact: Jess Hoffmann at jessamy.hoffmann@uconn.edu