<p>From what I have seen, Florida has 2 'stand alone' honors colleges; New College and Harriet Wilkes. New College is it's own college on Florida's West coast, where HWilkes is a campus of FAU, but still completely separate from the main campus, on Florida's East coast.</p>
<p>Can anyone provide input on the differences in the feel of the campuses, the student body-campus life, course offerings and academic intensity?</p>
<p>Our current interest is in neuroscience...for research, not a medical degree.</p>
<p>We visited HWilkes recently and liked what we saw, but do wonder about it being too small, and perhaps the course selection being too limited...and of course, since it isn't a college on it's own, it is difficult to research stats for the college since all the information I can find is for FAU as a whole. The school's connection to Scripps and Max Planck is intriguing.</p>
<p>We briefly visited New College over Christmas break last year, so the campus was shut down, which doesn't lend itself to a positive impression. D had crossed it off her list because of the narrative evaluation system (no grades), but now is rethinking...saying she might like the non-competitive nature of not chasing the grades.</p>
<p>Harriet Wilkes is very good for everything that’s health-related. Very rigorous. Scholarships. Transcripts where Honors Courses are clearly listed. Traditional grades.
400-500 students for a Honors College in a large public university isn’t that small, but the fact it’s on a stand alone campus has both drawbacks (it really “feels” small since you don’t mix with the 15,000 other students) and advantages (you can go to FAU for all the social/ra-rah stuff, and use the campus as your academic base; from a personal point of view, the town has a nicer feel than Boca Raton somehow, not sure how a college student would feel about it though).</p>
<p>New College is more free wheeling, larger school, more established/recognized. You can see its description in “Colleges that change lives” (the website or the book). The narrative evaluation is actually quite nerve wrecking because your achievements ut also your deficiencies are written out - if you plan to apply to grad schools (and NCF is a “feeder” for the top ones) they’ll see <em>everything</em> you did and didn’t do - although you don’t have to include them, you indeed free to omit them, but then grad schools have little basis upon which to base their decision since all they have is “satisfactory” (or not).</p>