<p>Hi everyone. I was accepted to the UIUC business school on December 11th and am interested in the honors program. How are students offered admission into the honors program? Also, if I haven't heard anything yet so does that mean I am not going to get honors?</p>
<p>There are two honors programs, one referred to as business honors and the other the James Scholar program. The first has scholarship money attached to it, the second does not. </p>
<p>The James Scholar (each college has its own James Scholars program), which has no scholarship attached to it, is generally just based on test scores (and sometimes rank) and is designed to capture somewhere near the top 12% to 15% of the entering business class. You will not receive notice of that until late February or March.</p>
<p>The business honors has scholarship money (range is $4,000 a year for in-state, $8,000 for OOS. They invite 125 as finalists. Finalists are chosen based on “leadership” qualities and essentially that means everything in the file counts, GPA and test score are very important but essays and ECs are also very important. Moreoever, each of the 125 finalists then do an interview with an alumnus (there are a number of them who do it) who adds comments and recommendations and that is also factored in. Eventually they actually offer business honors to about 60 to 70 of the finalists with the desire to get 30 or a little more to actually enroll. The intial invitation to be part of the 125 finalists has actually gone out already to some of those admitted in December. More will go out after the Feb decisons. If you were accepted to businees earlier this month and have not got an invite yet that does not necessarily mean you are out because there may be some now they are holding off on that will receive an invite after the Feb decisions. Final decisons (after the interviews are done) usually go out in March.</p>