Honors Program: any experience/insight?

<p>I may be an incoming freshman for fall 2013, and I was wondering what the Honors Program entailed. The webpage is hardly descriptive, so if anyone has some input it would be highly appreciated! In particular, do Honors students get priority class registration? Do they take different classes or have more core requirements? Any help would be amazing! :)</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-los-angeles/1480219-honors-program.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-los-angeles/1480219-honors-program.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Maybe this will help a bit.</p>

<p>A couple of new threads about the College Honors Program have been created in the past few days. Please search for some of them. In short, no priority enrollment. Benefits? None worth mentioning in my personal assessment.</p>

<p>Specifically, getting into the College Honors Program is not difficult. Allowing everybody eligible to have priority enrollment would probably mean giving a large student population priority enrollment, which defeats the meaning of priority. I believe that’s why the program once upon a time did have priority enrollment, but scrapped that.</p>

<p>There are no core requirements that I am aware of. I believe you just have to take a certain number of “Honors-content” classes per quarter, which may or may not be easy to fit into your schedule. That said, some courses are offered in their Honors version (e.g. Chemistry 20AH instead of Chemistry 20A). Even then, the benefits are hard to see, as some Honors professors are worse at teaching, may expect you to know things you don’t, and whatnot. Then there are specific courses that are Honors Content, such as some (maybe all?) fiat lux classes.</p>

<p>@alwaysawriter, thanks for the link, I did read the replies, I just wanted to confirm what I couple people posted there.
@phospholipase, thanks for the help! looks like honors isn’t really worth it…</p>

<p>The value of the benefits will depend of the individual. There is no priority registration, but you are able to check out books for the entire quarter and receive counseling from the honors department. </p>

<p>What is your major? Many students don’t realize major requirements will fulfill honors requirements. Check the honors master list to determine how many courses you will need. As a math/econ major myself, ECON 103, 121, and 122, along with Math 170A, 115AH, and 131AH will cover 25 units of honors credit, leaving only 1 honors collegium course (as a transfer) outside the major. On the other hand, some majors don’t offer many honors classes and so it will be difficult to complete the program.</p>

<p>Check out the honors collegium course list; Jared Diamond and others teach smaller, more intimate courses. But whether it is worth the effort to you will depend on how many honors units you receive in your major and over your GE courses.</p>