<p>I'm a presidential scholar and member of the Honors Collegium. You can pm me with questions about either.</p>
<p>And the Honors Collegium really does matter. It's an organization devoted to doing all that it can to help motivated undergraduates achieve what they want to do academically. The Collegium has great resources, and if you want to go to graduate school and pursue other academic honors, it is an extremely helpful organization. One of its advantages is its selectivity; there are only about fifteen members per grade level, and you can get a lot of individual attention and assistance. To be admitted directly as a freshman allows you to take advantage of the resources and attention immediately, gives you assistance discovering the myriad opportunities for research and faculty interaction from the beginning of your college experience, and saves you the trouble of applying later on.</p>
<p>ambidextrous... glad to have you on this thread! can you explain in more detail how the collegium helps for graduate school admisions? and do people in collegium have gatherings and really bond?</p>
<p>I know someone in the Collegium and she knows a lot of cool and ambitious undergrads from it - it definitely seems like a good way to make connections if nothing else.</p>
<p>"can you explain in more detail how the collegium helps for graduate school admisions?"</p>
<p>--the Collegium holds interview workshops, resume workshops, and other highly interactive and helpful sessions (members are required to attend a certain number each year) that help you gain and practice the skills you will eventually need when you apply to graduate school. The Collegium has staff members who help with writing personal essays and organizing and compiling applications for scholarships and/or grad school. The Collegium starts to prepare you for grad school right away...for example, freshmen and sophomores keep notebooks of significant academic, research, and extra-curricular experiences (and are given feedback on these notebooks) to simplify the process of later applications. These are just some examples of what the Collegium does to help prepare its students for grad school...I'm only a sophomore, so I haven't even fully experienced the help they can offer.</p>
<p>"and do people in collegium have gatherings and really bond?"</p>
<p>--yes. There is also a social side to the Collegium. I know everyone in my class by name, and I know many of the students in other grades as well. You definitely know you're playing Frisbee with the honors kids when somebody begins their throwing instructions with, "okay, imagine the x and y axis..." There are parties or cookouts for holidays (and at the beginning and end of the year), and each class is required to organize a social event each year for the whole Collegium. The Collegium also organizes intellectual social events, like free trips to the Columbus Art Institute and lunch with guest speakers from academia and beyond. I definitely want to stress that the Collegium has social gatherings, but I would not say that your Collegium class is your primary group of friends at Ohio State...your freshman class, for example, will have ten members, but you'll live on all three sides of campus, have ten different majors probably, and will all be involved in different extra-curriculars. So your Collegium classmates will be intelligent friends and fun people to talk to when you see them at Collegium events and around campus, but the kids in your dorm (or if you do a time-consuming extra-curricular, like band or a club sport, the kids in your activity) will probably be your better friends.</p>