<p>I don't know much about their honors program, so can someone explain what it is exactly? The dream is to eventually go to medical school (who knows if it will actually happen) so would being in honors help at all? I also saw that many people were recommending to do honors for a certain department instead. What would you recommend?</p>
<p>I also read one of the UW honors forums and there were people with 3.99 GPAs with 2300 on the SATs who got rejected. My stats are not as great as those, but what are they looking for then?</p>
<p>you need to understand that many applicants are from different pools of applicants.
I suspect the people complaining were from international applicants who are generally a lot more competitive.
Actually a 2300 SAT from Singapore for example is around the same as a 1400 here in america.
I had a friend from Singapore who was rejected from UW with a 2200+ sat and 3.8 college GPA.</p>
<p>Anyways from what I understand there are 2-3 types of honors.
Interdisciplinary honors
Department honors
and grad honors?</p>
<p>make sure you understand the difference between them and what they are all about</p>
<p>There is simply an unbelievable amount of misinformation on this board about UW honors. I would recommend you speak to someone at the school for any questions you may have. They are very helpful.</p>
<p>I was in UW Core Honors for 2 years before dropping out because it wasn’t helping me overall.</p>
<p>There’s 3 choices:
Core Honors (Finish the university honors curriculum)
Departmental Honors (Finish department honors curriculum, write thesis, etc)
Core + Departmental Honors (Do both of the above)</p>
<p>UW Honors, which you’re applying to in general (departmental you’d be applying through the department and I suspect you’d actually know about it before applying), looks to find students who can combine two fields, such as medicine and journalism, into a career path or similar. Their key word is ‘interdisciplinary,’ which means taking two more more disciplines and making magic out of it.</p>
<p>Yes, they’ll reject those 4.0s with SAT 2400s. They’ll take the 3.6s with SAT 2000s. It really all comes down to your essays.</p>
<p>That’s kind of a really broad and short overview… please let me know if you have any more specific questions. If you have questions really specific to your situation, don’t hesitate to PM me.</p>
<p>^ Very true.</p>
<p>I have known people who have gotten into Harvard, but haven’t gotten into UW Honors.
I also know people who are less qualified statistically people, but have still gotten in.</p>
<p>I am a graduate of the UW honors program ('08) and loved it. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. I think a hard lesson everyone has to learn in college is that sometimes it’s not that stats or numbers that matter. For this program, essays and the ability for an applicant to show broad, creative and subversive thinking is significantly more important that a perfect gpa or SAT. Really. No one there cares if you’ve never seen a B in your life, they care more that you spent your summers designing programs to help a local underserved population or wrote a play for fun. They’re not so much into perfect students as they are into students who have something to teach and are open to learning.</p>
<p>The honors program is a four year curriculum that has different general requirements than the rest of the schools (ie Arts & sciences, oceanography, engineering) and fosters intellectual, creative thinking in small classes with dedicated professors. The profs who teach these courses do so voluntarily, with no payment, and can do pretty much whatever they want. You do still have to complete your departmental requirements for your major, but I didn’t have trouble with this and graduated with two totally different degrees, with honors in 4 years.</p>
<p>Departmental honors can be done alone, but they are also required to graduate with the honors program itself. They usually involve 3 classes your senior year (1 class/quarter) which are more specifically focused and similar to graduate courses, culminating in an undergraduate thesis. If you only do departmental honors, you’re awarded your degree “with departmental honors in X.” If you do college honors, it’s “with college honors.” </p>
<p>Medical schools seem to value both sides of this (perfect students AND interesting students), and I had numerous classmates who have gone on to become MDs. To be fair, though, I’ve also had non-honors classmates who have gone on to become MDs.</p>