I have been admitted to the honors program at GW. I currently have other choices, specifically a higher rated university but as of yet I’m waiting on that decision as to wether I’ll be in honors or not.
Generally I’d like to know personal experiencess or opinions of the GW program.
Does it give you an advantage in anyway for internships etc.
Hi Possible Future GWU Student,
I am a current GWU Honors Student and Honors Peer Advisor. I study International Affairs with a concentration on security policy.
GWU Honors is amazing.
One of the best things is that you meet an incredible community of students. Pretty much all my friends are Honors students. You get access to opportunities and classes others can’t take.
Now I get why you focus on internships. They matter and I am just like you. For reference, I am a sophomore and I currently work at the State Department as a paid intern (pretty rare). I have friends who do all sorts of crazy stuff, and yes Honors does help with internships. Nothing on your HS resume really matters to employers after freshman year, so Honors is a great way to distinguish yourself. Honors courses tend to be rigorous (the hardest courses I have had were Honors and Arabic) and involve a significant writing portion, which requires critical thinking. Also, some of the best professors on campus choose to teach Honors courses since they know the students are really dedicated to the material. These are skills that matter to employers and hiring managers.
We also have separate Honors Academic Advisors who are the best. They are an amazing resource as you plan your 4 years.
I can sell you on all the tangible benefits of GWU Honors, but honestly, it comes down to a choice. Are you interested in getting an education to get a job, or getting an education because you like learning? Considering you wrote essays to get in I hope your answer is the latter. We look for intellectual omnivores, people who like to learn for the sake of learning. Trust me, when you are spending an hour to read 25 pages of Aristotle, you have to love it. The Honors program is about developing the whole person. We are not creating mediocrity, we are creating excellence and future leaders. The program is based on a similar curriculum at schools such as Ivies that require a nuanced and interdisciplinary education. There is a reason they are called Great Books and why people have studied them for centuries.
To give you an example of my Honors experience. I am taking an Honors course right now called Future Crimes. The course is taught by a Harvard and Oxford trained attorney from Latin America who was part of the recent Columbia-FARC peace negotiations. The course combines criminology, sociology, international affairs, and technology to understand the role that technology plays in changes in law enforcement and crime. I have written multiple research papers for Honors classes including a 13 page paper analyzing the ethics of covert action as seen through the eyes of the Athenian general and philosopher Thucydides. I wrote that paper my first semester at GWU. That just doesn’t happen anywhere else.
Also for your peace of mind, yes GWU Honors students have no problem whooping any other university’s butt when it comes to jobs, careers, or internships. The number of Georgetown dreams I have trampled is quite large. There is also a bit of fun when some haughty Hoya comes up to you at an event fully prepared to talk about how awesome they are, and you smack back with the incredible internship you have due to actually being in Washington D.C.
I hope this helps a little bit. If you have any questions feel free to email uhp@gwu.edu with any questions that you have. I just joined CC so I don’t know if you can private message me, but you can do that as well.
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@Policy About your internship at the State Department, how hard is that to do? I can see that you’re a very driven person just by what you’ve said here, but how hard was it for you to get the internship? What do you think distinguished you? If I am at GW next year, I’d be pursuing similar opportunities at every chance, I just want to know how difficult it is to actually do it.
Also, to the OP: I visited GW this weekend and the Honors college was very impressive. I met a few current students there and saw the optional honors housing. It’s very nice, on the Mt. Vernon campus, it has 4 singles attached to a larger common area with a fridge and a couch. Outside of that, every floor has a kitchen that anyone can use. The Honors advising seems very good, and they seem like they will work with you extensively to help you with anything you need. It seems to me that the Honors college and GW have an immense advantage from the connections you can make both in and out of the school.
I got rejected 5 times before I was accepted to State Department, for the same position. Its a bit of a crapshoot to get in. I am a pathways intern which is the only option available at your age.
Nonetheless, it is extremely competitive. I think the big thing is that you have to show your maturity. In the interview I was able to discuss my experience learning, doing research. I killed myself in high school and did research my senior year, average like 4-5 hours of sleep a night. I read about 3-4 hours daily about current events and worked with a mentor of mine who was a Ph.D. at a major university. So I really know my stuff. That meant that I had confidence during the interview. I also was a journalist in high school and published in GWU’s undergraduate IA journal which they liked.
Everyone gets an internship. To get the really good ones though, you have to work really hard.
I am happy that you visited GWU and enjoyed your time. I look forward to hopefully seeing you on campus next year.
I can also attest to the honors program and why I love it as a current member, but for totally different reasons! In contrast to the other response above, most of my friends are not honors students - I did live on the Mount Vernon Campus in honors housing but I spent most of the first few weeks of school auditioning for performing arts groups on campus so I wasn’t on the Vern a lot and didn’t hang out with the honors students on my floor as much. Because of that most of my closest friends ended up being other performers or otherwise living on Foggy Bottom. But, the honors community was a huge part of my freshman year and I love seeing honors students around campus now, they’re ALL friendly faces to see. It was huge for me that the classes were capped at 15 and like the other person said the advising is amazing - I’m also a peer advisor because I liked the experience so much. If you join you get assigned a student peer advisor in your major or in a similar type of major who will reach out to you over the summer and be a resource for you for your whole first year. Just last week I showed one of my freshman advisees my dorm room in district house since she will be living in the honors community here next year, and I share notes from my intro classes with her still.
I don’t have a big fancy internship (yet), but I do have a management job at the Institute for International Economic Policy in the Elliott School that has given me amazing experience - I delegate tasks to other students and have an oversight role in every single event we run. What I did get through the honors program this year (I’m a sophomore) was a research assistantship. These are positions posted on the honors website JUST for honors students that you can do for credit. So I’m a research assistant for a professor in the Spanish department, writing about the lives of Latin American immigrants and interviewing them in person. This is PERFECT for me because I’ll be studying abroad in Chile in the fall and the experience is great. At the end of the semester, I’ll have receive three credits on my transcript and I chose to receive a letter grade rather than a pass/fail, and the class will show up as “honors research assistantship” which looks great in addition to all my university classes.
But yeah, the honors program is the main reason I came to GW and it is an awesome resource, community, and way to make a bigger school feel smaller