Recently, I have become more and more curious about the balance between studying nursing and being in an honors college. If anyone has any info or experience, please let me know. I realize that nursing itself is already a very demanding major. Is it worth it to also carry the load of honors seminars and having to do a capstone project/senior thesis? After college, I plan to go to grad school to become a nurse practitioner. Would taking on an honors curriculum be beneficial? Or would it end up being too much along with preparing for GREs and applications?
My daughter is going to an honors program/scholarship competition in about a month. We are using it as a way to see the campus at its best (nice lunch, meetings with the president, etc) but are assuming nothing.
If she gets in, we will have to ask if she can drop out her sophomore year if necessary and go down a level in merit. I did that in my own honors program. We need a lot more details, but at this point we are going to go and see what happens first, and ask some tougher questions later.
@bearcatfan thanks for the response! let me know how it goes 
and best of luck.
We are also going to a scholarship competition where they will give us a tour of the honors program. We are also concerned about the workload but leaning toward joining the honors program because we were told by a college advisor that she’s never had one of her clients come back and complain about the honors program being too hard. We really like the benefit of starting off with a group of friends who have similar interests.
At a large university, the honors program often offers much smaller freshman year classes. It is common to have 500 students in some freshman courses at many large universities.
I am trying to understand that too. The honors programs are very different from school to school, I figured that much so far ha ha.
A few schools I am looking at for the first two years only offer honors sessions on electives and they also hold a seminar type class only for honors. Those are smaller classes with the seminar really small but have nothing to do with the core classes on your major. So a nursing student will have to take all the prerequisites in normal big classes as there are no honors sessions for that then take a small elective class and the seminar. Some students might enjoy that but others might find it not as important.
Then the last 2 years there are departmental honors and then indeed those are smaller classes on major. But any student with the appropriate gpa can apply for departmental honors without having spend the first two years on the honors college.
I think that’s how is done in schools like Umass Amherst and UNH. I think UMass Amherst even for departmental honors in nursing does not have honors sessions of the classes but only offers a couple honors seminars. But that’s a school with allegedly 64 nursing students so probably it does not matter anyway.
We are going to all admitted students days so hopefully we ll know more before May 1st…
UVa offers preference in course selection to students in their honors programs. Some universities put their honors college students in the best dorms. Many give the honors students the options of taking smaller seminars, but do not require it. Penn State offers a scholarship with their honors college, and makes funding available for special studies, such as some overseas study programs. I think you can always leave a honors program if it doesn’t meet your needs.