@Bigdaddy88
I think I understand what @nw2this is trying to say. See, at my state school, the honors program is literally like 80 students. Honors housing takes up literally two floors on the top of one building. My older sister attended, and while she didn’t like honors that much (most of the people there were engineering, and her interests were far from math and science), from what I heard from her it sounded like a really cool group that I would love (as a stereotypical nerdy engineer). I mean, this group went and had netflix marathons, super smash bros contests, late night pizza runs, lengthy discussions about physics and math and science, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everyone was there because they wanted to be there and they shared the same passions and it made for a really close knit community. Where I think nw2this is feeling apprehensive is that at Alabama, Honors is so large that the tight-knit community might be lost to those who simply use Honors as a way to get priority registration or the dorm they want.
Me personally, I’m looking for a “nerd colony” too. I know I’ll be able to find someone in honors to discuss Star Trek with, but with 'Bama honors being so large, it’s going to be harder to find a group that I really connect with. I guess that’s just networking skills though 
@goinggoing The issue was a combination of already having credit for certain lower division courses and limited course options for the remaining courses as I had only 1 semester at UA before I entered the upper division. I only took 24 lower division credits at UA, 6 of which were honors credits. At the time, my home state would allow 11th and 12th grade students to attend almost any public college/university in the state full time as well as attend a public high school full time, all tuition and fees paid. Looking back, it would’ve been fun to answer the question of “where did you attend high school” with The University of Washington, but it was hard enough to convince people that a top student would only take a 0.75 FTE class schedule at the high school even though they were taking 0.75 FTE of online or night classes at the local community colleges as well.
The Blount Undergraduate Initiative, like many other honors programs at UA, is not part of the Honors College because it existed before the Honors College and unlike CBH, did not choose to be merged into the Honors College. What is now the Honors College was founded as the University’s honors students program/association in the early 1980s and became the Honors College circa 2002. CBH was moved under the Honors College umbrella at that time. The Blount Undergraduate Initiative was formerly an honors program exclusively for students in the College of Arts and Sciences and started admitting students from other colleges a few years ago.