<p>DS just got his invitation to the Honors Program this weekend. It sounds like an amazing program! Is anyone else familiar with it?</p>
<p>@mommaof5 Congratulations!! How did your son hear of his invitation to the Honors Program - regular mail or email? My son is hoping to be invited also.</p>
<p>Can you tell me the typical stats of those invited?</p>
<p>omzac - He received it regular mail. The letter is dated Feb 1, but he just got it on the 9th. Good luck!</p>
<p>My3Daughters - I don’t know typical stats. I can give you my son’s stats.
ACT - 34
W GPA - 4.4
rank 1/254
NMF
I hope that helps.</p>
<p>Thank you, mommaof5! Wow, you must be so proud of your son. Great stats! Best of luck to him in his college decision.</p>
<p>Wow! Yes, he has great stats! My daughter’s are on the higher side of Fordham’s spectrum but not that high – congrats!!</p>
<p>Congrats momma!
My daughter is in the honors program at LC.
Freshman year was very hard, she got very little sleep, but she’s glad she is doing it. The core is smaller, making it easier to have a minor.
They take their 2 honors classes together, as a group, every semester, so they get to know each other pretty well…</p>
<p>@ LeftyLou I didn’t realize the Honor core was smaller. How many classes is it?</p>
<p>I’m in the RH honors program and highly recommend it, especially if your son is hard-working and curious. The focus for the first two years is on coursework (9 credits per term) in small, seminar-style classes, with each semester spent focusing on a different era–ancient, medieval, early modern, contemporary–in the development of Western culture. When you’re an upperclassman you get shunted into research so you can write a bachelor’s thesis.</p>
<p>I don’t know how the size of our honors core compares to that of the normal core, but it ends up being a pretty intensive program for science majors. Sophomore year is brutal at RH because two honors classes per semester are each split between two professors; right now I have nine different faculty members assigning me work.</p>
<p>You get a fabulous sense of community from taking your entire core with the same group. Dr. Nasuti is the honors advisor, and he’s a gem of a human being. At RH, you also get a key for 24-hour access to a frat house for nerds (“Alpha House”) between Hughes and McGinley. Do not do the honors program for the prestige, but do do it for the unique core, smaller classes, and bonding with studious/chill/weird people. (This year’s honors freshmen are a cult. They formed an honors intramural team and ordered custom t-shirts with an alpha and a quote from the Iliad on them. It’s brilliant and scary and wonderful.)</p>
<p>Stat-wise, most people are 2250+, I’d guess. I was 2360/4.85/NMF at a top-ranked, non-ranking high school and got the invite via snail mail–and committed that afternoon, because there is no better reason to attend Fordham.</p>
<p>Not sure, omzak, I’d have to ask my daughter, who is at a show right now. But she has said that there are fewer required core classes. Maybe because there are required honors classes?</p>
<p>At LC, they don’t have their own frat house, but they have a key to their honors classroom. (No t-shirts. No teams. LOL)</p>
<p>If I’m not mistaken, the Honors program in RH is a bit different from the Honors program in LC.</p>
<p>Congratulations, momma! My D is a freshman in the RH honors program. She is working hard but is very happy with the intellectual level of the work and with the friends that she has made both in and out of the program. At the accepted students day last April, there was an Honors reception in Alpha House. My D got to meet Dr. Nasuti and some of the other Honors students. That reception gave her a feel for the program and we all were able to speak with other students in the program about their experiences. If you are able to attend the accepted students day, I suggest that you make sure that you go to the Honors reception.</p>
<p>If you have any particular questions about the RH honors program, I can ask my daughter and post her reply.</p>
<p>@anglegrinderman, LeftyLou and hen4763 - Thanks for your helpful responses. My son called the Honors program office today, and the person who answered said that they would be notifying people on a rolling basis. He hopes that he is selected for the program. Has anyone else learned that they were accepted to the Honors program?</p>
<p>Thanks for all of the great information! My S would be in the LC honors program. I didn’t realize how different the two honors programs are.</p>
<p>I’m curious how they are different? I thought they would be pretty much the same. (Except at LC they only get an honors classroom, rather than a whole building.)</p>
<p>I feel like RH’s is not only much larger (2.5x as many kids per year) but much more extensively reorganized. LC’s honors program seems a bit more informal, a bit more similar to the regular Fordham core, just with smaller classes and a thesis. Meanwhile, all your RH honors courses each semester really are organized (as well as can be done with survey courses) around the same time period. We also don’t have a comp requirement.</p>
<p>My D received the Honors notice for RH campus yesterday. The letter says less than 40 of the freshman class are in Honors. Seems to be a very small program.</p>
<p>Congratulations!!
It is a very small program and hard to get into. My daughter’s class at LC started out with just 15.</p>
<p>I just was invited to the Global Business Honors Program yesterday which was something I wasn’t expecting at all! Does anyone know more about it? I didn’t even know it existed till now lol</p>
<p>anglegrinderman, I must disagree with your evaluation of the program. I too am an honors student at RH (fourth year), and I feel that the program is elitist and really much ado about nothing. </p>
<p>You are correct in describing this year’s honor’s freshman class as a “cult,” but I definitely wouldn’t consider that a good thing. I believe it is evidence that the program promotes a sense of isolation among its students and inhibits their full participation in the larger Fordham community. These students are treated by honors faculty and administrators as if they are somehow more worthwhile than the rest of the student body. Dr Nasuti is, unfortunately, most guilty of this practice; if he is a gem, as you say, he is surely much more of a tarnished Alexandrite than a sparkling red ruby. Even the method of selecting program participants is elitist. GPA and test scores are certainly considered, but ultimately, members are hand selected by Nasuti based on those attributes which he alone considers important. Sounds much more like a clique than a legitimate academic cohort.</p>
<p>Honors classes are smaller than regular Core classes, but only just (15 students on average instead of 20). The amount of coursework is, in my opinion, greatly disproportionate to the purported increase in academic quality. At the end of the day, students in honors classes are learning just as much information as those in regular classes (and typically with the exact same professors), but much more is demanded of them. The program’s only tangible benefits that I see are the exclusive use of Alpha House and the “in curse honorum” stamp on the diploma. These benefits hardly outweigh the harms that I’ve discussed.</p>
<p>anglegrinderman, you probably disagree with my analysis, but I know many honors students, non-honors students, and even faculty members and administrators that agree with me. Perhaps I can convince them to share their views in this forum. Overall, I am obviously unhappy with my decision to join the program, and I advise prospective students to avoid repeating my mistake.</p>
<p>(as this physics major procrastinates writing two art history papers for the honors core)</p>
<p>Of course the honors program isn’t for everyone. Some in my year would have been happier had they not joined, and some turned down invites. For me, what I get out of the program is worth the extra work. But it’s impossible to make a blanket statement about whether people in general should or shouldn’t join.</p>
<p>Must say, too-- Honors people do join clubs and other campus organizations, usually at a higher rate than non-honors people. In the university choir, for example, RH and Gabelli honors people are vastly overrepresented compared to their percentages of the overall student body. The same is true for other organizations, like the Ram, debate societies, etc. So I agree and disagree with you: while it does promote a certain isolation (you meet fewer people in core classes), by no means does the honors program inhibit students’ full participation in the university community.</p>
<p>I’m also convinced Nasuti selects students for primarily academic qualities, and that admission to honors is no more random than many other “academic/meritocratic” things like grad school or HYSPM admissions. Elitist? Sure. But what good educational system doesn’t cater to students at own levels of ability?</p>
<p>Honors classes seem to average about 11 students–about half the size of “regular” core classes. It is extra work; that’s why it’s an honors program. I do wish we didn’t focus so much on primary texts, because, as you note, non-honors students learn almost as much with much less effort. I guess that to the ideal student for whom some faculty panel designed the honors core, primary texts are better than secondary.</p>
<p>Again, people need to decide for themselves. For kids like omzac’s son and others who want a challenge like that of Gtown or other Big Name Schools, and who want to be surrounded by a microcosm of people who also got into much-higher-ranked universities but still chose Fordham, I would argue in favor of honors.</p>