I recently got accepted into University Honors and I was wondering how others who have gone through honors have felt about it? Are others who just got accepted unsure about taking the offer? If you plan to accept your honors offer, what attracts you most to the program? I also got into engineering honors. Is it a good idea to do both university honors and engineering honors?
If you were my kid I would take eng honors only. I assume you have a nice rigorous HS background and eng is going to be plenty challenging.
Early on I suggested to my son that he apply for university honors. His stats indicate a huge likelihood of acceptance. I thought it would be good to keep his options open. Instead he only applied for, and was accepted to engineering honors. I am glad now of his decision. He did not want to overload himself. Also, now that I understand that it is not only the engineering classes that he can take as honors classes but others such as his calculus. So what is best? Like so many things, that will be a personal decision. I will say though that I am now glad that my son has chosen to enter this fall strictly with engineering honors rather than both. I hope someone with experience in both might be able to respond too
@BIZP2424 My son also contemplated doing both several years ago and decided to just do engineering honors. Both require you to maintain a 3.5 GPA. Engineering honors requirements are mostly related to taking approximately 18 credit hours of honors credit with at least 12 in your engineering/science/math classes. This is not difficult to do. Some majors in engineering differ slightly on the credit hour requirements. In addition to this there is a requirement to come to one event each semester. So for my son this was not much of a commitment; he just attends the engineering honor’s course prescheduling social each semester. He feels that he gets a big gain with the priority scheduling for classes, honor’s faculty attention to get into undergraduate research, and the ability to fast track a masters degree.
The University Honors Program is set up to support any major, however, my son felt that it catered to liberal arts majors. They are required to live freshman year in honor’s housing which my son did not want to do. They also have credit limit requirements which are similar and would obviously stack with engineering honors but in addition they have to take a course which my son didn’t want to have to take. All honor’s students on campus are members of the Honor’s Student Council, however, University Honor’s students are required to maintain active status which is a time commitment.
We have a friend who started out in both Univeristy Honors and Engineering Honors, but also in the Corps, so he lived in Corps dorm. He dropped UH rather quickly, saying it was a lot of ‘fluff’-team building, cupcake socials, etc. He was chastised by Corps guys, for having to ask time away to attend the UH mandatory events. He kept Engineering Honors.
We have heard from multiple people don’t do 2 Honors programs.
I got into University Honors too and I accepted it. I’m not really sure if its worth it, but A&M has huge class sizes so I thought it would give me a chance to get closer to professors and get more opportunities.
@micdrio Yeah, I decided to accept it. I can always get out of the program if I want to.
@BIZP2424 University Honors requires living in specific dorms, and you aren’t able to pick your roommate. Better check their rules first-it may not be so easy to get out of the program, once you’re living in mandatory Honors dorms.
@52AG82 I know that I’m pretty much stuck in the program for the first year, but I can always get out of it at the end of freshman year. Thanks for the help though!