Honors College discussion

Anyone who got the invitation has decided to join yet? I’m extremely excited about this but the financial stuff prevents me from deciding right away…

My impression is it’s gonna become something like a liberal arts college inside Rutgers which can be as rigorous as other top LACs… but nothing can be said as for now… Still it would be awesome to be in their first graduate class

And that whole new building :slight_smile: all the opportunities sound really attractive too :slight_smile:

Finally, someone who has made a thread about this. Didn’t want to do it myself to avoid implicit humblebragging :wink:

If I do go, I’ll definitely be there (as scholarships depend upon by being there) and it seems really nice, better than the regular honors program I would say.

Just my theory but I think the kids who are selected for the College have shown interests in a wide range of disciplines and that “passion for learning itself”, whereas those selected for the Program probably have shown potential to dig deep in a specific field. A tortured math genius for example would be better off in the Program, I think…

I know some people got invitation for both but I wonder if it’s the College invitation from one school and Program invitation from another :-?

The only drawback I’ve seen so far is with that special curriculum it might be hard to do a double major/degree if one wants to… I’m not even sure it’s possible yet…

Coming from an engineering perspective, I am really not a fan of the Honors College. Having to commute to virtually all of your classes and missing out on living in Barr Hall seems like too much of drawback for whatever benefits the Honors College has. I’m sure the building will be very nice, but I hate how the engineers in the Honors College will be isolated from the engineers in the Honors Academy. They also don’t really seem to have a clear plan as to how this Honors college experience is going to translate into sophomore through senior years. I trace a lot of my success at Rutgers back to living with other honors and non-honors engineers during my freshman year, and I really hate to see this tradition ending.

I think it’s also ridiculous that they are requiring presidential scholarships to do the Honors College or lose the scholarship. If I were in that situation now, I would do it just to keep the scholarship, but having to make that decision really sucks.

If I attend Rutgers then yeah I most likely will do the Honors College. But there are scholarships later on that current students can get that aren’t dependent on the HC. So I guess if you get one of those(even though they’re probably harder to obtain), you can leave the HC if it becomes too much. Just a thought.

@Rhetorical13 the honors college living thing is only freshman year after that we can live in the other honors housing with the regular honors students and we follow the curriculum that the current honors college kids do. So I guess it works out later on?? Idk. Also I don’t know much about engineering but what’s the Honors Academy? Is it just the honors program for engineering?

@Rhetorical13 I think some presidential scholarships do get invitation to the Academy instead of the College, so it’s really not that they force the presidential kids to abandon the Academy - if they receive no invitation from the Academy they couldn’t go anyway

Does anyone know what the dorms/facilities are like? I certainly hope there are some tangible benefits to being forced into their building.

@Aly310 Honors Academy is the School of Engineering’s honors program. The difficulty right now is that the honors housing for later years for engineers is only open to Honors Academy students. They still haven’t figured out what they’re gonna do with the Honors College people who are engineers.

@rotckid To my knowledge, all Presidential Scholarship recipients receive the opportunity to do the Honors College. By virtue of getting into that, these students also are accepted to whatever school based honors program, but you can’t be in both simultaneously in the case of engineering (and possibly others, I can only speak for engineering). So for engineering at least, if you got an invite to the Honors College, you also definitely got an invite to the Honors Academy and you must choose. I have had engineering applicants with Presidentials tell me that they will only receive the scholarship if they choose the Honors College and not the Honors Academy. I’d need to actually read one of these letters to confirm that, but from what I’ve been told it seems to be the case.

@foolish It’s gonna be brand new, and looking at the most recent dorms that have been built (BEST and Livi Apartments), the interior is going to be gorgeous. Beautiful lounges, a cafe, meeting rooms, AC, large rooms, etc. I’m sure the building itself is going to be spectacular.

@Rhetorical13 I actually got invited to the Honors College by SOE but no invitation to the Honors Academy. They say invitations are still coming so I’m not sure yet if it is the case… I’m an international student and so didn’t get the Presidential scholarship though.

@Rhetorical13‌

I know this is probably very oddly-specific, but do you know if the desks in the BEST dorms (which I’m assuming will be most similar to the honors college’s) are large enough for a small desktop and monitor/keyboard?

@rotckid You’ll get an invitation in the next two weeks more than likely asking you to apply.

@foolish Yes you can definitely fit everything, the desks are huge haha. I stuck a 37 inch TV on the desk and still had room for keyboard and space to write.

Alright great :slight_smile:

Hi! My daughter was accepted into both the honors college and the honors program. It seems pretty clear that she has to chose one or the other, that they are mutually exclusive. I think she is more interested in the Honors college. Is anyone going to the Honors College showcase on Monday 3/9? We went to sign up and were told that it was full which was really disappointing since we are from out of state. If anyone is going can you post any useful info on here? Thanks.

I originally signed up, but just decided not to go. It’s only 2 hours long, and I can assume it will just be faculty reading the brochure and website information to us - probably nothing useful as the building is only semi-built as of now.

Hello. We went to the Honors College Open House on February 20th and found it extremely beneficial. Directly related to your question, we asked an Admissions representative, “is there any reason to want to be in the Honors Program instead of the Honors College?”, and without hesitation she answered, “no”. In addition to the dedicated dorm, Honors College students will have better access to research opportunities, faculty, career services, etc and will take the same classes as the Honors Program students. The administration expressed a strong desire to make the Honors College successful and the first entrants to the Honors College would seem to be given every opportunity to become individually successful.

If you have specific questions, I would suggest e-mailing the Honors College staff directly (Honorscollege@rutgers.edu). They’ve been very responsive to all of our questions.

Hope this was helpful.

@Bhappy05 That’s a really simplistic answer to that question. As I described above, an engineer may not want to bein the Honors College because then they would have to commute to classes every day. Same goes for some of the SEBS students who need to go to Cook early in the morning.

As part of the open house, they had a panel of current students speak about life at Rutgers. They were all asked about Honors College vs. Honors Program (they were in the Honors Program) and all said that they would have chosen the Honors College if it were available for them. One was an engineering student.

Just passing along what I heard at the open house. It seems that location is the only reason not to be in the Honors College. The dorm is only for freshmen year, however, and I assume many first year classes are not yet major specific so a student would be commuting to classes regardless of where they live. After the first year, I believe that they said that the Honors College students would then be able to live in the Honors Program housing.

For what it’s worth, I doubt they would let people speak at the open house if they were going to say that it was not a good program :slight_smile:

When I went to the honors program open house, they said that there isn’t more benefit to it other than the freshman dorm. They said they would have access to the same research opportunities as the honors college. I think it is what @foolish says - no matter what open house you go to, they are going to say that the program is good and comparable to the other honors offerings at the college.